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SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND THE MEANING.
OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Thesis fiat Qho Dogma of Ph. D.
MECMGAN STATE UNEVERSITY
David D. Anderson
1960

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Sherwood Anderson and the Meaning of the
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SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND THE MEANING
OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

By
David D. Anderson

AN ABSTRAST OF A THESIS

Submitted to the School of Advanced Graduate Studies of
Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science
in.partia1 fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1960

Abstract

It is the thesis-of this study that Sherwood Ander-
son's works in all their variety of form from short story
to essay to novel to autobiographical memoir must be
approached as a unit rather thanas isolated segments in
order to determine what Anderson was trying to do in his
writing career, what he was trying to say, and whether or
not he was successful. Thus approached, the thesis further
contends that the works as a whole provide the record of
one man's attempt to understand the relationship between
the individual and the time in which he lived and to deter-
mine the ultimate meaning of that relationship.

In attempting to establish the validity of this
thesis the study takes three factors into consideration.
First, the works are examined chronologically in the effort
to determine the evolving pattern of Anderson's approach to
finding the meaning of the relationship between the indivi-
dual and his time. Secondly, the study focuses on the
works themselves. However, because Anderson's letters and
the background of his life shed much light on the specific
instances of experience that he was trying to interpret,
they are discussed when they aid interpretation. Thirdly,
the study includes all of Anderson's works pertinent to the

study, including all that appeared in book form and much
that appeared in periodicals only.

For purposes of convenience the study divides Ander-
son's literary career into three major periods: from 1912
to 1918, when Anderson first began to attempt his analysis
of the American scene; from 1919 to 1929, when his analysis
became close and penetrating; and from 1929 to 1940, when
he began to formulate his conclusions.

The first period is discussed in Chapter II, ”The
Man and the Myth," and Chapter III, ”Tentative Analysis.”
The former deals with the background of Anderson's forma-
tive years, an understanding of which is essential to the
analysis of a majority of his works, while the latter dis-
cusses his first three books, M McPherson'g _S_q_n_,
Marching 1:13.13, and gig-American Chants, as well as several
of the early uncollected essays and short stories.

Anderson's second period is discussed in Chapter IV,
”Moments of Insight;" Chapter V1, "The Larger View: Social
Analysis and Despair3” and Chapter VI, "Introspection and
Identification." The first deals with Anderson's achieve-
ment in Winesbur , Q_h_i_9_. The second studies Anderson's
attempts at analysis of major social problems in the novels
3923 39.4.29. and gap; W and the velumes of short
stories, The Triumph g; the Egg and 19329.3. and nag, in
which Anderson came closest to naturalism. The third deals

with Anderson's search for permanent values in his own life

and his native Midwest, and it records his slow discovery
of such values.

Anderson's last period is discussed in four chapters,
Chapter VII, ”The Townsman;" Chapter VIII, "Re-entry Into
the World;" Chapter IX, "The Townsman and the World ;" and
Chapter X, ”Final Statement.” Chapter VII discusses Ander-
son's attempts to recreate the nineteenth century personal
world in his own life as well as in his writing; Chapter
VIII looks at the works in which Anderson attempts to bridge
the gap between past and present; and Chapter IX records
Anderson's attempt to diagnose the ailments of a depression-
torn nation and to point out the values that may remedy those
ills. Chapter X discusses Anderson's last two works, 3.91.3.9.
2935, in which he evokes the spirit that he feels is per-
manent in America, and his Memoirs, the work in which he
records his final appraisal of. the meaning inherent in the
American experience.

The study concludes with a discussion of Anderson's
Permanent contributions to American literature and an evalua-
tion of his place as a writer in relationship to the major
literary figures of his time.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND THE MEANING
OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

B
y. \

David DliAnderson

A THESIS

Submitted to the School of Advanced Graduate Studies of
iflnhigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1960

Copyright by
David Daniel Anderson
1960

11

Preface

For the many kinds of assistance necessary to a
study of this sort I owe many thanks: to the libraries
of Michigan State University, The State of Michigan, and
the City of Lansing for securing and making available
source materials; to Professors Russel B. Nye and
Bernard I. Duffey for the assistance and advice that gave
shape to the study; to Professors Evelyn H. Scholl, Carson
C.EMmilton, and Claude M. Newlin for critically reading
and commenting on the text ; to William B. Thomas for
making books available and for a good deal of helpful
conversation; and to my wife, Pat, not only for many
hours of physical labor but for making the whole thing
possible.

D.D.A.

111

CHAPTER
I.
II.
III.
' IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.........

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION................. 1
T'riEl-IANANDTHEMYTH............. 6
REJECTIW AND THE BEGINNING- OF THE SEARCH. . . 46

. . . . 95

MOMENTS OF INSIGHT . . . . . . . . . .
SOCIAL ANALYSIS AND DESPAIR. 134

INTROSPECTION AND IDENTIFICATION . . . . . . . 208.
o o o o o o 258

THE LARGER VIEW :

m TOA‘JNSI‘CAN . O O 0 O O O O O o o
RE-ENTRYINTOTHEWORLD. . . . . . . . . . . . 299

THETOWSMANANDTHEWORLD.......... 350
000000000398

0 O O C 418
. . . 436

FINAL STATEMENT. . . . . . .
CONCLUSION...........

iv

CHAPTER I
IN TRODUC TION

For more than thirty years it has been stylish for
critics to regard Sherwood Anderson's Winesbur , 9_h_i_c_>_ and
a handful of his individual short stories as solid literary
achievements and to dismiss the bulk of his work (often
apparently unread by the critics) as failures or, more
charitably, as not quite satisfying.1 Such criticism of
Anderson's work tends to take either one of two directions:
the first of these is the attempt to combine subjective
value judgments and sweeping generalities in brief essays
which purport to give the modern reader all he needs to know
about the works in a few dozen pages.2 The second critical
approach, represented by Irving Howe3 and James Schevill,4
attempts to be comprehensive and thus fair to most or all of
Anderson's work, but ultimately this approach bogs down in
biography and Freudian analysis, both of which are fascinat-
ing byways, but neither of which is an adequate substitute

___~

18cc, for example, Lionel Trilling, _i_h_e_ Liberal
Im ination (New York, 1948), pp. 33-43. """"‘

21bid.

3Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (New York, 1951).

4Janet Schevill, Sherwood Anderson, gig Life and work
(Denver. 1951). "—‘1 "" ' """

.Nv

 

for careful attention to the works themselves in the effort
to find out what Anderson was trying to do, what he was try-
ing to say, and whether or not he was successful.

Both of these critical approaches are for obvious
reasons unsatisfactory; the first, while often written in
brilliant and presumably profound phraseology, says little
about the most famous works and nothing about the lesser
known, depending for its effect upon the condescending pity
of its conclusions. The second, on the other hand, while
attempting to unravel the web of biography, autobiography,
myth, and fabrication, nevertheless bogs down in the side
issues cited above and results in critical biographies which
turn out to be unsatisfactory as either criticism or bio-
eraphy.

Ultimately criticism must be based firmly on a care-
ful examination of the works themselves in an effort to
interpret the meaning of those works, to determine the rela-
tive success or failure of the techniques of expression em-
Ployed by the writer, and to establish the relationship of
each of the individual works to the writer's work as a whole.
In Sherwood Anderson's case, this approach has not been used
consistently by any critic. (Maxwell Geismar's essay on

Anderson in his _T_h_e_ Last 9_f_ the Provincials5 approximates

this approach, but it has the misfortune of being too brief

‘—

5Maxwe11 Geismar, The Last 9; the Provincials (Boston,
1949), 221-2840

 

3

to examine all the works in the detail necessary); and in
Anderson's case this approach is mandatory, for it is only
by such a careful examination of his works that their ulti-
mate meaning can be determined.

Much has been made of the fact that the bulk of Ander-
son's work is autobiographical; he has been identified with
the protagonists of most of his novels and a good many of
the short stories; in addition, he wrote three volumes of
autobiographical sketches and memoirs as well as six of
essays, one of journalistic writings, and the text of a
photographic essay. Such a concentration upon cne's self
is dangerous from a critical point of view because it gives
rise to complaints that the writer lacked objectivity and
the ability to select artistically, and that he did not grow
intellectually. All these criticisms have been directed at
Anderson by critics who complain that he was so fascinated
with the wonder of his mythical escape from industrialism
and of his becoming a writer that he was unable to grow
artistically and intellectually into the literary gianthood
that had been prephesied for him early in his literary career.

Such criticism does have in it some truth, but it does
not contain all the truth about either the man or his work,
and to accept it as such is unjust. Anderson's works were
essentially autobiographical, as he freQuently admitted in
his letters and published memoirs, but as he further pointed
out, his autobiography was not intended to be concerned

4

with facts but with feelings, not with names, dates, and
places, but with meanings. As a result it is evident that
the works as a whole comprise a multi-volume spiritual bio-
graphy that records and attempts to determine the meaning
of the impressions of generic man in the unique period that
saw America transformed from an agricultural to an indust-
rial state.

Fcr Anderson this change coincided with the time of
his own life, and the place where that change occurred most
suddenly and spectacularly was in his own Mid America. As
a result his works attempt to analyze and interpret that
experience, ranging from initial awareness in Egg: A Mig-
!9_B_t Childhood through man's attempt to regain his indivi-
duality in M Marriages; through the initial impact of
industrialism in 293; M, the inerticulate attempts of
the worker to cope with the machine in Marchng Meg, and
into ultimate contamination of the countryside and the indi-
vidual in E21929 Me. That Anderson and his life play
central roles in these works is obvious, but the material
facts have been transmuted into an analytical biography of
an era.

Not only is it apparent that Anderson has devoted his
works to an increasingly careful analysis of his time in an
effort to determine its ultimate meaning, but a careful
analysis of the works indicates that he was continually
coming closer to the recognition and realization of that

 

 

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5

meaning. Through apparent repetition that actually proves

to be closer and more careful examination of the material
with which life provided him, Anderson arrived at some recog-
nitions that may be the only possible answers to the question
of the ultimate meaning of our time.

It is the argument of this study, then, that Anderson's
works, in all their variety of forms, from short story to es-
say to novel to autobiographical memoir, must be approached
as a unit; that the works as a whole provide the record of
one man‘s attempt to understand the relationship between the
individual and the time in which he lived and to determine
the ultimate meaning of that relationship for the individual.

In any attempt to establish the validity of such a
thesis, several factors must be taken into consideration.
First, the works must be examined chronologically in the
effort to determine what Anderson has learned about the re-
lationship between individual and era. Secondly, this exa-
mination must focus on the works themselves. Because Ander-
son's biography and his letters often aid interpretation,
they will be discussed where necessary, but only as aids to
understanding the works. Thirdly, the examination must in-
clude all the works that are pertinent to the study.

For purposes of convenience the works may be divided
into three major periods: from 1916 to 1918, when Anderson
first began to attempt his analysis of the American scene;
1919-1929, the period in which his analysis became close and
Penetrating; and 1929-1939. in which he began to formulate

his conclusions .

CHAPTER II
THE MAN AND THE MYTH

The Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, the only newspaper in
that business-oriented and boosting community in North Cen-
tral Chic carried a news article in its March 9, 1941, issue
headed "Sherwood Anderson, Former Elyria Manufacturer, Dies,“-
Had the article been printed forty years earlier it would have
been less ironic and more factual whether or not Anderson had
physically died at that earlier time because it marked the
actual death of Sherwood Anderson, businessman, industrialist,
and booster, and the birth of Sherwood Anderson, novelist,
short story writer, and constant, eager seeker of the ulti-
mate meaning of the American experience.

In the years prior to February, 1913, when Anderson
made his final break with manufacturing and with the Elyria
in which such a label was regarded as a badge of honor, he
had come a long way, as measured by the standards of Elyria,
of most of America, and of the Taft Administration, just
then clearing out its desks in preparation for its reluctant
trek northward. At thirty-six years of age Anderson had
accomplished what would seem to the superficial observer to

M

1The Elyria Chronicle-W, March 9, 19%, l.
6

7

be visible proof of the reality behind the myth promulgated
by Horatio Alger and the campaign biographers of James A.
Garfield, and he was still a young man with the time and
the potential to carry his re-enactment of the myth to its
logical conclusion in a position of wealth, prestige, and
power. Hence this same superficial observer would be baffled
by Anderson's sudden departure from Elyria and his vague ex-
planation of his actions more then ten years later in ”When
I Left Business for Literature" and in A Story-331mg
Em. A more discerning observer, however, would not only
accept Anderson' a departure but he would have known that it
was inevitable, just as was the vagueness of the long-delayed
explanations. He would have seen that the American myth had
not been personified in spite of the fact that the folklore
of literature has perpetuated the belief that it had, and he
would have seen that the same forces and pressures that had
produced Anderson the businessman made inevitable Anderson
the writer and the seeker.

Anderson was born, according to the records of Preble
County, Ohio, on September 13, 1875.2 88 a new, vindicated
America was self-righteously flexing its economic muscles v"

in one arm while with the other it was waving the bloody

_

2For the facts of Anderson's early life this chapter
is indebted to the unpublished doctoral dissertation by
William Sutton, Sherwood Anderson: The Formative Years
(1876-1913), The_——__Ohio Sta-Tm iversi't'y'; ’17—'19 3. Uni—sea other.
Wise cited factual material comes from this definitive source.

shirt, meanwhile mouthing the words of the myth with which
Anderson's life has become so entangled. These activities
were to continue throughout his formative years, and they
provided much of the impetus that, when combined with the
intimate environment of his family and of the small Ohio
towns in which he grew into adulthood, determined the course
of his life.

The year 1876 was a time of conflict and controversy
on the national scene stemming from the scandals of the Grant
Administration and the narrowly-averted return to revolution
that saw power politics make a mockery of democratic proce-
dures in the attempt to insure continued control of the Ameri-
can governmental machinery by the forces of the increasingly
powerful manipulators, speculators, and industrialists who
had come into their own with the close of the Civil War. For
the Anderson family of Camden, Ohio, it was a time of peace
and of economic security, however, almost the last such time
that its members were to know. Anderson's father, Irwin, was
8 Skilled harnessmaker, practicing the trade he had learned
in the Seventh Ohio Cavalry during the Civil War. He owned
his own shop and employed a helper; he participated in such
activities as the town band and the local Sunday school; and
he was noted as one of the town's best practicioners of the
ex-scldier's ancient art of refighting the war orally and
retelling the adventures he had experienced in the Southwest
titer his discharge. The harness shop, like the barber shop

.v

 

and the general store of late nineteenth century rural Amer-
ice, was an ideal place for combining skilled hand-crafts-
manship with storytelling, and Irwin Anderson made the most
of both. He was secure in a friendly environment that valued
his traits, and he was a successful small-town family man.

Irwin Anderson was not the ruined Southern dandy that
Sherwood has described, but was rather the son of a prosper-
ous farmer, one of the pioneers who had changed rural Ohio
from a wilderness into a prosperous agricultural state in
less than fifty years. He was the product of an environment
that believed firmly in the virtues of hard work and thrift »
as the sure road to success. In spite of his youthful excur-
sion to the Southland after the war, there is no reason to
suspect that he did not himself believe in those virtues.

By 1872, he had already established a harness shop in
the village of Morning Sun, near Camden, and he married mama
Smith, a girl of twenty who had been the serving girl and
ward of a nearby farmer. To her the young craftsman must
have seemed an ideal catch. Here in Morning Sun, Karl Ander-
son, the artist, was born in 187#, and about that time the
family moved to nearby Camden, a larger town, where Irwin
opened another shop, a daughter, Stella, was born, and then
Sherwood. At that time the family future seemed secure and
happy.

The luck that had served Irwin so well through the
war and into the Camden period seemed to desert him after

10

a few years, and his business began to decline in spite of
the fact that he was respected and liked in the town. It
was more than a matter of changing luck, however, as his
son Sherwood later came to know; it was that he had been
born in a time when America was undergoing its transition
from an agricultural country served by hand craftsmen to an
urban society geared to consume the standardized products
of mass manufacturing. Caught in the conflict between the "
old and the new, Irwin found that the old virtues had no
bearing on success or failure, and he began to drink and to
take refuge in his stories.

When the shop failed, evidently caused by the avail-
ability of machine-made harnesses and by Irwin's drinking,
the family began a series of moves to other small Ohio towns,
still pursuing the promised but elusive prosperity, but no
Ohio town could provide Irwin with the opportunity that
national economic forces denied him. In Caledonia, near
Marion, he opened a shop for a time. Here Irving Anderson
was born, and the stay there gave rise to the family legend,3
denied by the evidence,4 that Irwin and Warren G. Harding,

3Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller'g Story (NOV York,

4mm Harding family moved to Caledonia in 1870, when
Warren G. was five, and at fourteen he moved to Iberia,
According to his biographer, Willis Fletcher Johnson, in
1119 Life _o_1: Warren Q. Hardi__n_g (N.P., 1923) Harding's musi-
cal Eterests and band membership began in Iberia.

 

 

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11

a resident of Caledonia at the time, played together in

the town band. At any rate two of the most widely different
lives that Ohio has ever given rise to paralleled momentarily
before the Anderson family moved to Clyde on its path down-
ward in the late nineteenth century economic and social scale,
while Harding, on the crest of the times, moved to Marion and
' eventually to the White House and notoriety. For Irwin Ander-
son notoriety of a different sort came earlier.

In Clyde, the first family home town that Sherwood had
any remembrance of, the family fortunes declined rapidly. By
this time Irwin Anderson must have realized the folly of any
dreams he had of success as a craftsman-owner. Defeated, he
worked for others, in harness shops and in a small factory,
but increasingly he found refuge and satisfaction in drink-
ing and in story-telling. This was the image of his father
that Anderson remembered most clearly and eventually learned
to understand, the father that caused him so much anguish in
his youth. Irwin Anderson had for all practical purposes
become a displaced person, deprived of his place as crafts-
man by the changing economy of the new America, and for the
remainder of his life he was as Clyde knew him: humorous,
fun-loving, and likable, Just as he had been in Camden, but,
deprived of his pride in his work and of the respect it earned
for him, not of much account.

When Sherwood grew old enough to see the social and

economic structure of the town around him, he realized that

 

 

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12

his father did not fit into it except on the lower levels

of toleration and acceptance rather than belonging. In

spite of the image of the family that appears in Anderson's
early works, the family was not desperately poor; rather,

as Anderson stated later in A _S_t_9_ry W's £22.21 and as
William Sutton has confirmed, they managed to maintain at
least the outward appearance of respectability. Each of the
children in turn began to work to help out as he became old
enough, but this was customary and expected in a society that
had not yet learned to pamper and over-protect its children.

Living as they did, with Irwin changing Jobs as other
men change their moods, the family maintained its precarious
hold on respectability, Stella teaching school for a time and
the boys helping the father in his new occupation of house
and sign painter. Odd Jobs were plentiful, too, in a small
town, and Sherwood's ability to find and work at a variety
of them gave him the nickname ”Jobby." Evidently a bright,
alert boy, as well as an ambitious one, he became well known
and liked in Clyde, especially as a re-affirmation of the old
belief that environment alone could not hold down a willing,
able worker.

During these years, the late 1880's and early 1890's,
various forces were at work in America that were beginning
to be felt even in a rural town such as Clyde. America was
SPOWing, eXpanding, controlling, providing the maximm of
Opportunity for a young man to rise in the world; and this

13

spirit, more than a reaction against his father's ways,
probably accounted for Sherwood's ambition, although his
later works indicate that he held the opposite impression.
Towns surrounding Clyde, even as close as Fremont, seven
miles west, and Bellevue, seven miles east, were booming.
Fremont's limestone quarries and its promise of natural gas
indicated a bright future, while Bellevue became a division
point on the Nickle Plate Railroad, and it, too, began to
expand. That their fever for growth had to spread to Clyde
is indicated in T__;_ar, _A_ Midwest Childhood, and there is no
reason to disbelieve it. In this new age education itself
was relatively unimportant beyond the ability to read, write,
figure, and deal shrewdly, and Anderson's school records in-
dicate that he subscribed to the belief. Ambition, shrewd-
ness, and willingness to work would put a young man in the
position to ride the crest of the boom, and Sherwood had

_ Plenty of these. The failure of Irwin Anderson to cut him- \
self off from his belief in the old and to Join forces with '
the new was part of the force behind Sherwood’s drive to J
succeed, but the principal credit must be given to the times
themselves and to their promise of liberal reward in the form
of things that the Andersons lacked. Hustling was in the

air, and Sherwood, like his later fictionalized self-portrait,
Tar, hustled at every Job he could find, eager to work his way

up.

14

Something else was in the air in Clyde that, while
less obvious to the ambitious boy, nevertheless became in-
creasingly important to him as he became a man and a writer.
Almost unconsciously, through his surroundings, his activities,
and undoubtedly through the stories of his father he absorbed
the traditions of the rural nineteenth century Midwest. The
Clyde Race Track, a point of major local interest in Clyde as
in all of the Midwest trotting belt, attracted and held his
interest, and, as Sutton shows, his boyhood activities were
essentially the same as those Mark Twain has described for
Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and the rest. Perhaps this accounts
for Anderson's frequent acknowledgement of his debt to Mark
Twain as he learned to know Twain and to realize that these
things were significant. Thus, although yotmg Sherwood was
a hustler, he was also a pirate, an adventurer, an idler in
summer fields and woods. Anderson's cave can still be seen
near his old home Just as can Tom Sawyer's near Hannibal.

More important in later years than these boyish ex-
cursions was the town itself. As the birth and burial place
of Major General James B. McPherson, the friend of Grant and
a hero of the campaigns in the West, Clyde was a proud little

town,5 described by Henry Howe in the eighteen eighties as
"a wholesome. cleanly-appearing “‘11:“ with a pepulation °f

_¥

5Clyde residents also take pride in its being the birth-
Dlace of the late Senator George Norris and of Pvt. Roger
Young, a leading military hero of World War II.

6Henry Howe, Historical W 2; 925:, (Norwalk,
01110. 1896). II. 55 .

A,“

pa
'-

15

2,380. As such, in spite of the influx of the new philosophy
of acquisition and the farm implement and bicycle factories
that brought the new techniques of standardization to Clyde,
it was throughout Anderson's residence there essentially a
rural community, the trading center for the surrounding farms
and smaller villages that dotted the fertile sandy lake plain.
Clyde was for all practical purposes the important center of
a comparatively small world, and in such an atmosphere one
could not help but live on the most intimate terms with his
fellow residents. One could feel that he belonged, that he

' had put down roots, that his fellow human beings knew that he
was alive, and knowing, cared. It was this air of intimacy
and of friendly concern that Anderson took for granted while
he lived in Clyde, even noting that his father was liked in
spite of his vagaries, and he later observed that this inti-
macy was the first casualty caused by modern industrialism.
As smothering as Anderson noted this intimacy to be on occa-
sion, nevertheless in an increasingly de-personalized society
he saw that basically it was good, that in Clyde man was his
brother's keeper, lending a hand or a has or carrying a pot
of soup to a sick neighbor Just as willingly as he gave odd
Jobs to a boy who both needed and wanted them.

Anderson's realization of the importance of this aspect
of village life could only come later, however. Meanwhile
his life was centered in Clyde, in doing the things that
young men do and in his preoccupation with his mother, a

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hard-working woman who, according to Sutton, was not the
silent, mysterious woman whom Anderson later portrayed but
who was in fact as well as in later symbol the figure of
strength and stability that held the family together and
give it direction. Sherwood loved her intensely although
there is nothing to indicate that he ever learned to under-
stand her as he did his father, whom hemver loved even
though he later came to identify himself with Irwin, a long
process that points out the direction for much of his later
creative work.

In a burst of martial ardor, perhaps engendered by the
heroic bronze figure of General McPherson looming over the
village graveyard where he had played as a boy, Anderson en-
listed in the local National Guard Company, Company "I" of
the Sixteenth Infantry. Evidently at nineteen, in 1895, he
had no plans for leaving Clyde, at least not immediately,
for he enlisted for five years and began attending drills and
summer encampment regularly as well as participating in the
local parades, meanwhile working in the new bicycle factory,
learning about mass production techniques through first-hand
experience. At this age there was nothing to distinguish
him from his companions except possibly a restlessness that,
coming from his father, found its release not in story-tell-
ing or in tipping a bottle but in frequent changes of Jobs,
and perhaps in dreaming of military glory as he polished
the buttons of his National Guard blues.

0‘

 

 

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17

Later that year, his intimate world began todisinte-
grate. His mother died at 43‘, officially of tuberculosis,
and his father had neither the strength nor the ability to
keep the family together. Karl, nursing his ambition to
paint, left for Chicago shortly after, and later Sherwood,
after working as a stable groom for about a year, Joined
the great influx of farm boys whom Sandburg noted as they
came to the big city. This was probably in the fall of 1896.
Sherwood was twenty, and he was eager to find the opportunity /.
that Chicago promised. He moved in with Karl and began look-
ing for a Job.

Rolling apple barrels in a warehouse was not much of
a Job, but it was a start, and Anderson was willing to work
at it even though he hated it. To a friend from Clyde,
Jeanette Baden, he talked about his unhappiness, while to
her brother Cliff? he revealed his dreams of wealth and
position, still convinced that because he was willing to
work he would gain them.

As almost all of his works inspired by this early
period show, Anderson, the boy from the country, was alter-
nately awed and repulsed by the city around him, and the v’"
American dream, still alive within him, seemed more remote

7Later known as John Emerson, a leading movie pro...
ducer and life-long friend, one of the few who had known
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at times than it ever had in Clyde, as the Padens, brother
and sister, remembered. Nevertheless, the Clyde Enterprise
reported that he had obtained a ”lucrative position" in
Chicago,8 and Anderson, who undoubtedly had let the home
town think so, was probably confident that he was merely
anticipating what would soon be true.

The pattern of the tines conspired to take him out of
the apple warehouse, however, as the American consciousness
became increasingly aware of the island to the south, torn
by revolution threatening American investments and possessed
by enormous potential as a logical place for American expan-
sion. William Randolph Hearst, his New York Journal, and
his followers kept the situation alive in the American mind
until the M_a_i_n_g was sunk in Havana Harbor on February 15,
1398. Hundreds of Americans were killed, and the yellow
press pointed to the Spanish as the perpetrators. The
country demanded war, and McKinley acquiesced, making un-
acceptable demands on the Spanish government. The nation
needed a minor war to keep its patriotic muscles in trim,
and young Americans, Sherwood Anderson included, were eager
to prove themselves in the eyes of the G.A.R. and U.C.V.
as the aging veterans' war stories gained gloss and glamour

over the years. Perhaps an eagerness to show Irwin was

8Quotations from newspaper accounts and from Ander-
son's early advertising writing are from Sutton.

19

partially responsible for Anderson's letter to his company
commander, printed inthe Clyde W. He wrote:
If by any chance this war scare amounts to any-

thing, and the company is called, please telegraph

me 708 Washington Boulevard and I will be with you.

Whether this was engendered by patriotism, by the de-
sire to show Irwin, or merely by the desire to escape the
apple warehouse is debatable. Anderson himself always depre-
cated his motives, noting that he was broke and that yellow
fever seemed more desirable than cold storage. His reception
as a hero in Clyde, he later commented, was nothing but bunk.
Nevertheless such an explanation, especially in retrospect, '
fails to take into consideration the spirit of the times,
sparked by the press and fanned into flame by the oratory of
politicians, boosters, and the G.A.R. Anderson's enJoyment
of his military service, as reflected both in his fiction and
in his autobiographies, seems to be hardly that of a man who
saw the war as the lesser of two evils. In all probability 8
he was as eager as any of the others to participate in the
manifest destiny of America, an activity that came to be re-
garded as ludicrous if not dishonorable in later years by
sensitive Americans including Anderson himself.

Anderson's Spanish-American war service was short and
comparatively uneventful so far as the war itself was con-
cerned. Of course, at Clyde the men received heroes' send-

offs including a banquet complete with patriotic program and

Speeches at the opera house, followed by a dance. The company

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Joined its regiment in Toledo on April 26, 1898, and the
regiment was sworn into federal service on May 12, the Clyde
company becoming Company "I" Sixth Ohio Regiment of Volunteer
Infantry. Later it went south to the notoriously ill-planned
camp at Chickamauga, Georgia, and to Camp Poland, Tennessee.
They finally arrived at Cienfugos, Cuba, on January 4, 1899,
well after the war was over, for four months of occupation
and patrol duty before returning to the States, a lavish
oratorical welcome in Clyde, and mustering out. For Company
”I" the war was brief, uneventful, and without glory.

For Anderson, however, the Spanish-American War pro-
vided important personal experiences. Perhaps the most im-
portant of these was the almost mystic concept of unity in-
herent in large bodies of men working and marching together,
welded into a non-thinking but strongly-feeling mass. That
this concept gave rise to the novel Marching Meg is obvious,
but this was not merely an isolated incident. Rather the
memory of that communal power engendered by the mass of
men recurs in his work and in the search that his life be-
came, possibly accounting for much of his fascination with
industrialism and the machine at the same time that he
feared and hated them for what they had done to men.

Although this almost mystic concept of sheer physical
power still influenced his work as late as A M-Teller'g
£931 and in the 1930's when he was working with the idea
of making a play out of Marc_l_1_i§g A93, nevertheless, Anderson

21

knew that it was dangerous. Not only did he see man become
united through their mass activities, but he saw men battered
and bruised by the mass action of other men. This happened
in several instances in the training camps, perhaps accomt—
ing for Anderson's indecisiveness in concluding Marchig As};
and for his life-long unwillingness to identify himself com-
pletely with any mass movement. Always willing to stand and
be counted on the side that he thought right, nevertheless
he would never submerge his own individuality in the movement.
More significant than the influence of the army as a
mass, although Anderson never perceived it himself, was the
fact that Company "I” in particular and the army in general
was a microcosm of late nineteenth century American life,
especially of the villages and towns. Each company was from
a town and as such was representative of the cross-section of
its origin. Thus Company ”I” was Clyde in miniature, and
the company street became a main street, but here in a town
of tents, barriers were down and Anderson lived on the most
intimate terms with all of them, from the banker's son to
the ne'er-do-well. The; uniform had removed the barriers of
appearance among them; the freedom from town mores gave them
the opportunity to show themselves as they were, and Anderson
was able to move freely among them in a way that the walls
of houses, churches, and social groups would have made im-

Possible in Clyde.

 

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Anderson had enJoyed his army experience, and that he
was successful as a soldier is demonstrated by his promotion
to corporal, but he was mustered out in May, 1899, having
traveled, having been exposed to a foreign country, to
foreign manners, and to the heady stuff of being part of a
conquering and heroic army by acclamation if not in fact.
Whether or not he thought consciously of the matter, he re-
alized that there was nothing in Clyde for him; probably only
his father and his brother Ray still lived there, and he went
to Springfield to visit Karl, who was drawing illustrations
for Th; mfg H923 Com anion, and Stella and Earl, who also
lived there. Irving was working at Sherwood's old Job, roll-
ing apple barrels in the Chicago warehouse, but that was not
for Sherwood.

His goal of achieving material success was unchanged,
and realizing keenly that education was becoming more and more
necessary as society became more complex, he returned to Clyde
briefly to work on a farm during the summer and then in the
fall returned to Springfield, again moving in with Karl,
Planning to make up enough high school credits at Wittenberg
Academy so that he could enter the college. At twenty-three,
a grown man and a veteran, he applied himself diligently,
Perhaps in an effort to compensate for his lack of comrade-
ship with the younger boys; he served as a handyman at the
boarding house to earn his keep, and he finished the year
successfully, graduating and serving as a commencement speaker

at the exercises on June 4, 1900.

l‘

 

23

That the academic aspect of Anderson's career was
distasteful to him and unpleasant in spite of his good aca-
demic record is shown by the fact that Anderson ignored this
phase of his career whenever possible, on occasion mentioning
briefly, as in the Memoirs, that he had attended the college
rather than the academy.9 His life outside the school was
undoubtedly more satisfying to him, encountering as he did
the world of business and the world of ideas, both of which
attracted him strongly. The former, of course, was more
immediately important to him, especially in the person of
Harry Simona, advertising manager of Crowell Publishing
Company, but the influence of the other world, represented
by Trilena White, a schoolteacher whom he long remembered,
had effects on him that fired much of his later restlessness
and dissatisfaction.

Andersoan formal education ended at the Wittenberg
Academy commencement. Perhaps he was restleq perhaps im-
Patient, perhaps unhappy and frustrated. At any rate, when
Simona, impressed by his commencement speech on ”Zionism”
offered him a Job in the Chicago advertising offices of the
company, he accepted immediately. Stella, Irving, Ray, and
Probably Earl were in Chicago at this time, and he Joined
them. The sense of family was still strong in Anderson at
twenty-four as it was to be for the rest of his life.

_—

9Sherwood Anderson, Memoirs (New York, 1942), 136.

 

 

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Perhaps this, too, was one of the factors behind his readi-
ness to move on.

At the time Anderson arrived in Chicago the age of the
booster was a lusty infant eager to break its way out of the
confines of its Victorian crib and grow to the proportions
that were to dominate so much of American life and conscious-
ness during the new century. The new and growing advertising
industry was the voice of that infant, and its function was
not merely to inform the public of the availability of the
goods produced by the new industrialism but to create an
ever-increasing demand for them in order to insure not only
the continued growth of industry but the continued growth and
influence of its advertising voice. Depth and motivational
research had not yet been discovered, Freudian psychology
was unheard of, and with the exception of newspapers and
magazines the mass media were still in the future. At this
time the advertising man was primarily a booster, a man who
could meet other men on their own level, chew a cigar, have
a drink, tell a few stories, and sell either space or services
or both. In this respect he was descended from the drummer,
a late nineteenth-century human phenomenon with whom ”Jobby"
Anderson was thoroughly familiar from his activities up and
down Main Street and at the train station in Clyde.

There were other qualities desirable in one who would
be an advertising man at the beginning of the century, before
aPeoializs.tion, standardization, and an all-important hierarchy

25

entered the agencies, and Anderson was prepared to meet both

of these. The first of these was something that any newsboy,
even in Clyde, learns early: to take advantage of the breaks
before someone else does, and Anderson had the opportunity to
show his dexterity in this way soon after his arrival. The
head of the Chicago office had wanted to hire another, and
Anderson's position was hardly secure. Then a manufacturer
ordered two hundred lines of copy. Anderson was sent, primar-
ily as an errand boy, to have the contract signed. Discover-
ing that the order was a mistake and that the manufacturer had
wanted two thousand lines, he telegraphed Simona that he had
engineered the increase, and he returned to Chicago to a salary
increase and an even more hostile immediate boss.

Another quality necessary for the well-rounded advertis-
ing man of the day was a certain flair for words, combined
with an imagination strong enough to make them live, agressively
and confidently, on the page. Anderson had his opportunity
to show this ability when he changed employment, going to
the Frank White agency as a copywriter at the instigation of
8 SPringfield friend, Marco Morrow. With this agency and the
Long-Critchfield agency which absorbed it, he maintained a
long connection, traveling and soliciting accounts as well as
writing copy.

In his mid-twenties Anderson was a success, presenting
a picture of a young American not only on the rise but on the
make, Just as was the age of which he was a part. With self-

26

confidence, money in his pocket, and stylish clothes to wear

he was sure that he had discovered the path that so many Ameri-
cans before him had traveled. But Anderson was not one who
could rest easily or relax; the combination of "Jobby's"
eagerness and Irwin's wanderlust, Joined with the fact that

all Chicago was available for his inspection, made him rest-
less. Just as he had known Clyde so thoroughly, so did he

want to make Chicago his own, and his odd moments were spent
wandering, looking, asking questions, and listening. A man
learned by being alert, Just as did a small-town boy, and
Anderson would not be caught napping. Combining this with

his travels to factories throughout the Midwest, he was getting
a thorough acquaintanceship with the America that had come into
being as industrialism came of age.

That Anderson was still convinced of the validity of
what he was doing is evident from the articles that he wrote
for the agency's magazine, Agricultural Advertising, a trade
Journal sent to clients and prospective clients. During
1903 he wrote a column called ”Rot and Reason” and for ten
months in 1904 he wrote one called ”Business Types.” In
addition he wrote other articles for the magazine and several
for 1h; 59.52.93: a publication of the Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The value of these articles is two-fold: first, they pro-
vide tangible evidence of the type of philosophy that domi-
nated business and industrial consciousness during the early

Part of the century when merchandising techniques were coming

 

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27

into prominence, and secondly they show that Anderson accepted
such beliefs. Although this has been characterized as booster
or huckster philosophy, the sort of thing that reached its
inane peak when Bruce Barton became its theologian in the
1920's, actually the movement was permeated by a sincerity
that the contemporary names tend to deny” The motivating
philosophy was naive, stressing the necessity of diligence
and ambition as prerequisites to success; it was righteous,
stressing the sacred quality of property and the peculiar
endowments of the men to whom it was entrusted; it was evi-
dence of a faith transcending reason that accepted the right-
mass as well as the inevitability of the establishment of a
business-dominated culture in America.

All these things appear in Anderson's trade Journal
writings, and there is no evidence that he did not subscribe
wholeheartedly to them. In "Push, Push, Push!" he wrote:

Put your shoulder to the wheel, infuse some of

that whole-souled energy you have sticking in that

frame of yours, and you will find inanimate things

will fairly fly.

This is the philosophy of ”Jobby" Anderson as well as
the business age, the belief that carries within it the culmi-
nation ef three hundred years of puritan conviction that the
elect, those who showed that they were worthy, would be re-
warded. Couched in the terms of a football coach in the
locker room at the half, it is reasonable to believe that
Anderson, like the coach, mouthed the phrases without question-

ing them. Later, in ”The Lightweight,” after noting that the

28

prizes would go to the fittest, he went further to predict
the outcome of this philosophy of ”push”:
We'll balance up all right in the end. We'll

do our share toward making this the biggest and

brightest spot on the whole black earth, and we'll

now and then make a winner out of a possible

suicide. It's all a Question of knowing and

teaching...

That Anderson was convinced of the validity of these
beliefs when he first began writing them is unquestionable.
Still, some notes of tempering or of realistic acknowledge-
ment appear. In ”The Born Quitter" he inJected a sly plea
for mercy for the unsuccessful, and in another piece he
frankly acknowledged that the only possible goal and measur-
ing stick for business success was money. Perhaps even then
he was beginning to question the values that he had adopted
so easily and naturally, although Anderson himself gives no
such hint in his later autobiographical works and in the
Memoirs acknowledges frankly that his prime interest was in
boosting and in showing off his success.“-0

Still, however, changes were taking place in his think-
ing, imperceptible at first. In the Memoirs he testifies
that on trips he began to cheat a bit, writing his copy
hurriedly and then taking time to walk the streets of little
towns, taking time to ”think."11 Marco Morrow remembered

that Anderson had begun to write a bit on these trips, once

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mentioning that he was undecided whether he would be an
artist or a millionaire, and in the Memoirs he recounts

a brief episode during which he taught history to boys in

a settlement house.12 Obviously something was happening,
something that Anderson himself was unaware of, and he had
begun to re—examine the path that he had marked out for him-
self. Further indication of this is the response to a story
he had submitted to the Saturday EvenAgg .1393; at the request
of its editor, George Horace Lorimer, whose attention had
been called to Anderson by the magazine's publisher, Cyrus
Curtis, a reader of Agricultural Advertisgg. The story was
reJected, according to Marco Morrow, because it did not glor-
ify business and the business man. Yet at about the same time
Anderson delivered a speech on "making good.” Clearly Ander-
son was no longer the confident young man he had been a few
years earlier. Perhaps he still had faith in the American
myth, but it was no longer unshaken.

Meanwhile, however, Anderson's personal affairs had
changed, so that he was no longer the free agent that he had
been. 011 one of his advertising business trips to Toledo,
Ohio, he had met Cornelia Lane, a girl whose background indi-
cated that she would be a suitable wife for a man who was
determined to be a business success. Born on May 16, 1877,
she was a member of a middle class family that was both well-
off and socially respectable. Her father was a shoe whole-
saler and a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Toledo.

___

12Ibid. , 141-142 .

3O

Cornelia herself was a graduate of Western Reserve Univer-
sity, receiving the degree of Ph. B in June, 1900; she was
a sorority girl, a literary editor of the school annual,

a devotee of the University Theatre, in which she had acted;
and she had traveled in Europe after her graduation. She
represented, in short, all the things that Anderson was not
and was painfully aware that he was not. She was attractive,
well educated, refined; he was physically attractive, self-
assured, possessed a flairfbr words, and dressed like a dandy,
with overtones of the race track and the smoking car, and
perhaps the reason for their mutual attraction was in these
contrasts. He was successful in the business world that was
sanctified by her father; she was a lady, skilled in the
graces that had been lacking in the long series of small-
tcwn frame houses in Ohio and Chicago boarding houses. It
would be pleasant to assume that they shared literary inter-
ests, but Anderson was still largely untutored, finding
stimulation in people more frequently than in books.
Cornelia, however, had the advantage of exposure to books
and plays, and it is safe to assure that she was willing to
act as tutor if Anderson would permit it. At first mutually-
shared literary interests could hardly have been more than
casual, although both possessed the capabilities for a more
discerning and intense interest once the potential of litera-

ture had been revealed, a discovery that they probably made
together.

"w

31

They married on May 16, 1904, had a brief honeymoon,
and then settled in an apartment in Chicago while Anderson
resumed his career with added incentive. Marriage into a
family such as the Lanes gave him standards upon which to
base his life and his work, standards that could be main-
tained only by acquiring enough money to live a life of the
sort of genteel respectability that was approved by the
middle class of Toledo, Ohio, at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century. Part of this genteelness consisted of the social
graces: well-appointed table, pleasant talk, a circle of
friends in for a quiet evening; but a more significant part
was the occasional quiet evening when, prior to the discovery
of the vacuum tube, it was considered civilized to spend
Quiet evenings taking turns reading aloud. The Andersons
did this increasingly often. There is no record of what was
read, but Cornelia, with her flair for the dramatic and her
suitable background, was probably the instigator of these
evenings, while Sherwood, conscious of his educational short-
comings, followed along. He always remained silent on this
aspect of his personal life, and Cornelia has chosen to
follow the same course. Whatever the facts of these early
married years, it is obvious that Sherwood had entered a
life different in two ways from his past. First there
entered the elusive quality called taste, changing with the
tins, but nevertheless an attempt to value what seems to be

first-rate; and secondly, an awareness that words could take

 

M

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32

on form as well as function. The two were to merge, Join-
ing forces with his own always intense interest in the inti-
macies of human life, and emerge in his work.

Within two years Anderson had decided to leave Chicago,
and in the fall of 1906, he took on the presidency of the
United Factories Company, a Cleveland firm that specialized
in direct-mail advertising and selling on the behalf of firms
subscribing to the service. The reason for this move seems
to be clear: this was an opportunity to move up the socio-
economic scale. As the president and principal officer of
a firm, he could match titles if not salary with his father-
in-law. Behind this laudable motive, a growing dissatisfaction
with what he was doing was making itself felt. It is imposs-
ible to measure the extent of this, but in 1938, he remembered:
"I grew sick of it. I think I was most worried by my own grow-
ing slickness. I determined to get out of advertising writing.
There were too many lies being told,” and so he accepted the
Cleveland Job.

That this reason was partially the result of hindsight
based upon a vague amount of fact is indicated by the nature
of his new Job. Essentially it was an extension of what he
had been doing in Chicago. Although he headed the firm, he
was primarily brochure and advertising writer and traveling
solicitor of new companies to Join the firm. One of his first
efforts was to place the company's business on a man-to-man

basis with its customers, writing

33

I promise as a decent man trying to be square

that every man, rich or poor, small or large,

shall have a square deal from my company.

Every word of this book is written under my
personal supervision, and for it I am responsi-

ble to you...what is written...is true in spirit

and in fact...If you are not satisfied, you can

feel free about taking the matter up with me

personally, and I promise you that I will not...

pile up words to confuse you...

Here is the first clear-cut evidence that Anderson was
becoming aware of the fact that words had a power and an in-
nate ability of their own that their user should respect
rather than pervert; here is a situation that presents an
odd contrast in that Anderson is trying to adapt the intimate
business relationships of Clyde, Ohio, to an increasingly im-
personal business structure; and here is the first tangible
evidence that something was going wrong with Anderson's dream
of material success. Such a statement could hardly have been
written with such a strong air of conviction by a man who
knew he was lying; hence, it is safe to assure that Anderson
was convinced of the honesty of his efforts. Still. a busi-
ness man, however, still dreaming of material success in
terms of a bigger house, prestige colleges for his children,
and a life of middle-class respectability, as he recounts in
the Memoirs,13 nevertheless Anderson was seeking to return
to an intimacy and a code of values that was rapidly being
pushed out of the American business scene as growing indust-

rialism demanded greater impersonality. The move from Chicago

*

131bid. , 153.153.

 

 

'11

34

was the first of a long series of movements, each engendered
by dissatisfaction and disillusionment, and already, while
still actively engaged in his present he was unconsciously
seeking a way back to Main Street in Clyde, Ohio by attempt-
ing to use a personal, small-town approach in a business as
impersonal as mail-order selling.

Nevertheless Anderson tried to be a good company presi-
dent and a good family man. Perhaps his dreams of business
gianthood began to fade as he immersed himself in the two.
Difficulties arose over defective incubators that were diffi-
cult to resolve without sacrificing either his personal in-
tegrity or the financial stability of his firm. Anderson
emerged shaken but with integrity intact although the firm
barely survived, and disillusionment with this venture started
to gnaw at his dreams. However, on August 16, 1907, his son
Robert was born, and Cornelia was still living up to his
image of her, providing a good home life, with poetry and
French lessons to soften the bluntness of his background. In
Cleveland Anderson was in a trap: he knew that the new age
conspired against honesty, and at the same time he had com-
mitted himself too fully to be able to do anything but what
he was doing. Late in 1907 he found a way out of the Cleve-
land fiasco in a mail-order paint business in nearby Elyria.

The early years in Elyria promised a great deal, both
to Anderson and to his new fellow townsmen. Here there was

not the intensity of competition that marked Chicago and

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Cleveland, but rather a quieter, less grasping way of ap-
proaching a sure thing, although the ability to take ad-
' vantage of one was no less respected in Elyria than else-
where. Elyria in 1907 was a town of contrasts, an old town
with a tradition of righteousness stemming back to its New
England founders and a town fully committed to the indust-
rialism that had been part of its co‘nsciousness since its
founding at the falls of the Black River. In 1907 stately
homes hold themselves aloof from the drabness of small
factories and workmen's houses along the New York Central,
the river, polluted by industrialism, serving as an effective
barrier. Caught midway between the booming trashness of the
steel mills in Lorain and the sedateness of an Oberlin that
had lost the somewhat disreputable air of excitment of its
early years, the residents of the stately homes turned their
backs on the former even while while they invested in its
shares and looked toward Oberlin for cultural sustenance.
Here was a town that perhaps indicated both to Anderson
and to Cornelia that the dream was still within reach. Here
the dream would not culminate in the spectacular success
possible in the great cities, but the reduction in material
scale would be more than offset by the opportunity for cul-
tural pursuits to which they were firmly committed, and here
Anderson became ”The Roof-Fix Man” and president of the Ander-
son Manufacturing Company. His new venture represented some-

thing entirely new. In this he was no longer an employee,

eA‘

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36

and the business was successful from the start. At first
it was patterned after the United Factories structure, but
later it started manufacturing when in 1908 his company
merged with a paint factory from nearby Lorain.

Essentially Anderson's function was similar to what he
did in Cleveland. The company operated on a mail-order basis,
and Anderson's responsibilities were for sales promotion and
advertising. Again Anderson attempted to inject a personal
note into his sales brochures, but the sincerity of the Cleve-
land advertisements was missing, and one advertisement show-
ing the back of a man's head, indentified by the words "This
is the Roof of the Roof-Fix Man" indicates that he was getting
more and more cynical about his chosen profession and about
his own role in it. Shortly after this he started a scheme,
patterned after the United Drug Company, which he termed
"Commercial Democracy." Simply stated, this was a plan to
sell shares of stock to paint dealers. A little magazine of
the same name, written by Anderson, advocated a close personal
relationship between manufacturer and dealer and hinted vaguely
at a new socialistic economic order that the plan would result
in if successful.

’ It is doubtful if the Elyria business and professional
men who subscribed to stock in the resulting company, the
American Merchants Company, knew that Anderson was planning
such economic heresy. Rather it must have seemed like a good

venture, for the company was capitalized at $200,000} of which

s-J‘

37

Anderson held $25,000 in stock and was in complete charge.
Evidently Anderson still planned to succeed, but it was a
different sort of success from that he had anticipated only
a few years before in Chicago. Not only had its scOpe
narrowed considerably, but reaction against the conventional
kind of commercial success was beginning to become pronounced.

Meanwhile Anderson's family life was apparently happy.
Two more children had been born, John in 1908 and Marion in
1911. Anderson, in common with other businessmen of the town,
belonged to the Elks and the Clyria Country Club; Cornelia
was active in the Fortnightly Literary Club, and both belonged
to a discussion club. From all indications the Anderson home
life, like his business life, was secure and promising, and
the family was destined to find a solid place for itself in
Elyria.

Surface appearances were deceiving, however, and the
Swing disenchantment evidenced in his advertising work was
Symptomatic of even more serious doubts that Anderson was
keeping to himself. William Sutton notes that several Elyria
residents began to think him moody, a bit radical, and in-
creasingly careless about his appearance. In the Memoirs
he remembers that he was suddenly struck with the meaning-
lessness of what he was doing,11' and in 1938 he stated that
it was then that he began to drink, to do a bit of woman-

_—

1"lbid. , 154-157.

 

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38

chasing, and then to write. Essentially his writing was
undirected, at least at first. He remembered, "I quit
wanting to change people. I began to want more and more
to understand rather than change," thus starting almcst at
once the course that his writing was to take throughout his
life in a career that was devoted not to changing but to
understanding.

His writing was not the secret sin that he pictured
in A Slog-Teller'g §_t_9_1:y, but, as Sutton shows, rather
almost common knowledge, perhaps even an exciting idea to
the people in their small literary circles. As he remembers,
probably accurately, Cornelia was not hostile to it; she was
merely sceptical, and Anderson, conscious of the educational
gap between them, resented this.15 Their family relations
began to deteriorate rapidly, and time that should have been
devoted to business was spent writing. Often he mentions
writing and destroying a book called "Why I Am a Socialist,"
but none of his acquaintances ever remembered having seen it.
If the book actually was written, Anderson was still too
shrewd in the game of business ever to let it get out of his
hands. Yet he continued to write.

During these years of uncertainty, depression, and
frustration the origins of the Anderson myth began to take
form, rising partially, from the fact that Anderson himself

*—

151b1de 9 188'189e

39

was unable to discuss the period with any degree of obJec-
tivity until many years later when the almost-unnoticed
Memoirs were published. Even then, however, he was unable
to force himself to be complete and impersonal, yet he re-
vealed that much of the anguish of the time stemmed from
the quandary he was in. On One hand he was a man with family
responsibilities which he knew he was obliged to discharge,
and on the other he couldn't go on with what he was doing.
Perhaps the shadow of Irwin Anderson's improvidence haunted
him. At any rate it was a situation in which he couldn't do
right, and even in later years he was unable to acknowledge
that he couldn't or wouldn't discharge his family obligations.
The specter of family haunted him almost always, until years
later when he gathered his children around him in Virginia.
William Sutton has, however, done a remarkable Job of
gathering the facts that Anderson forced himself to forget.
Among these were the details of his writing that his associ-
ates remembered. During 1911 and 1912, his secretary remem-
bered typing several stories, the details of which escaped
her, which were sent off to publishers and subsequently re-
Jected. More importantly, friends remembered that both
Kipp-y McPherson'A Sgg and Marching M93 were conceived and
the first drafts written in Elyria, and stockholders in his
company remembered him writing at his desk when he should
have been tending to business. Whether it was a substitute
for drink as he later recalled or not, clearly the image of

I.

 

5'!

l

40

the success of "Jobby" Anderson had become something that
he was desperately trying to understand.

Cornelia neither encouraged nor discouraged his writ-
ing, maintaining an aloofness that he could not help resent-
ing, at the same time planting the seeds of doubt that were
to plague him for years; yet her efforts to help him with
grammar, punctuation, and spelling were humbly accepted.
When he read parts of li_i_n_dy McPherson'A _Sgn to their liter-
ary group, the consensus was that the novel was hopeless.
Mere dedication could hardly have made him continue; writing
must have become like drink. As the novels as finally pub-
lished indicate, he had completed his reJection of material-
istic values, but he had no idea of what was next.

The quandary that he was caught in was not easy to
solve. In his business life he had found it impossible to
Put into practice the human values that he derived from Clyde
and from his experiences in the army; his efforts to deter-
mine what had gone wrong in American life through his writing
were not only ineffectual but scorned; and he had a position
and a family to maintain, neither of which was responsible
for his present predicament. Such a condition could not last
indefinitely, and in late November of 1912, the event occured
that gave rise to the Anderson myth of abrupt reJection of
business and materialistic values, a myth perpetuated by
Anderson and his friends in spite of the fact that it contains
only the spirit, not the essence, of truth.

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As Anderson later recalled the incident,16 his de-
parture from the Anderson Manufacturing Company was abrupt,
conscious, and yet mystical. Suddenly in the midst of
dictating a letter to his secretary he stopped, all at
once overwhelmed by the sordidness of his business career.
He toyed with the idea of a rational eXplanation of his
sudden decision to quit, and then decided against it. In
a moment which he said was either dominated by shrewdness
or insanity, he looked at his feet and said, "I have been
wading in a long river and my feet are wet."17 After a mo-
ment he said, "My feet are cold, wet, and heavy from long
walking in a river. Now I shall go walk [on dry land.“-8
With that he walked out the door and along the railroad
tracks, determined to devote the rest of his life to litera-
ture.

Such an explanation fails to take into consideration
Anderson's mental state at the time, his innate sense of
responsibility and practicality, and the accounts of the
episode that appeared in Elyria and Cleveland newspapers.
The evidence points either to an ill-conceived attempt to
run away or to a temporary mental breakdown, and it tends

to support the latter view. The facts of his actual leaving

16in Sherwood Anders, "When I Left Business for
Literature,” Cent , CVIII (Aug., 1924), 489-496.

17Ibid. , 496. 18Ibid.

42

have never been established, but on December 2, 1912, the
Elyria Eveni_gg Telegram carried a news story headed, ”Elyria
Man is Found Dazed in Cleveland.” The story states that he
was found dazed and incoherent in Cleveland and hospitalized
suffering from nervous exhaustion. This was ascribed to
overwork, the article concluding:
Added to the cares of the Anderson Manufactur-

ing Co. and other enterprises in which Anderson

was the guiding spirit, for the last several

months he has been working on a novel and at

odd times has been writing stories for magazines.

Engrossed in writing Anderson worked many a

night until nearly dawn and then attended to

business affairs.

Two months ago he was warned by a physician

that he was overworking and...friends...only a

week ago remarked his fagged out condition.

This account, corroborated by articles in the Cleveland
Press and the Cleveland Leader, diaputes the fanciful accounts
in the Centm and in A Story-Teller'g Story and the even more
incorrect version in the Memoirs.19 In each case he implied
that he never returned to Elyria and presumably that his busi-
ness and family were left stranded. However, although this
did not happen, nevertheless it was this incident that served
as his point of no return. A final account appears in the
Elyria paper a few days later headed "Sherwood Anderson Will
Write Book on Experiences as Nomad,” stating in the course of

the article that Anderson had ”through deep thought" thrown

 

, 19Here he mistakes the date, giving it as 1910 rather
than“ 1912, an error that might have been caught had he lived
to correct his copy.

 

 

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43

himself into a trance deliberately for the experience in
order that he might understand it, and in all probability

he believed it himself, but the news story suggests another
possible explanation. This seems to be another manifestation
of Anderson's life-long need to explain and to Justify his
actions in his fiction, his autobiographies, his letters,

and in the series of prefaces, forwards, and notes with which
he introduced his works. There was considerable scepticism
in Elyria as“ to whether or not Anderson was really sick at‘
the time, but in all probability he was. His mind was de-
manding that he find a way out of the quandary that he had
put himself in.

After brief hospitalization and a short vacation in
Toledo, Anderson returned to Elyria, having made up his mind
to dispose of the business, either because he had determined
to find a Job in which he could devote more time to writing
or because the Andersons felt that they could no longer stay
in Elyria after such an episode. Probably both factors are
involved, for he began to wind up his business affairs upon
his return, and the Elyria Democrat carried a notice in its
February 16, 1913, issue that Anderson had decided to return
to Chicago to the Taylor-Critchfield Advertising Company.
Three days later he left, to be followed by Cornelia and
the children when he made preparations for them.

The break that Anderson made with business ethics was
not at this point a physical one as he would have us believe,

hu‘

V‘-

‘1

44

but it is a very definite spiritual break. Although he
was to continue writing advertisements for a number of
years, many of them in the same boosting vein, he no longer
believed what he wrote. Rather, belief was reserved for
the personal writing that had become more and more important
to him, especially after he became imbued with the aesthetic
atmosphere of the Chicago Renaissance. The important fact
was that his idealogical ties were broken, that he knew
that the American dream had become corrupted, and that
through his examination of the dream as it was approached
in his own experience he would come to understand it and
perhaps to find a solution to the inevitable dehumanization
that accompanied it. The Elyria years that had provided him
with the most promise for material success were behind him,
deliberately reJected as the standards they represented proved
to be meaningless, and his life had taken a new direction.
Almost thirty-seven years old, with a trunkfull of
manuscripts, Anderson was taking a decisive step, but not
one that would destroy him if he failed. He could always
write copy if his writing failed, Just as he was going to
in the immediate future, whether he believed it or not, but
without knowing it he was taking the only step that could
make his writing come alive. The heady atmosphere of Chicago
in its most fertile literary period would provide the needed
impetus, together with much dross that he would have to

learn to reJect. Had he deliberately foreseen what was

45

ahead he could not have made a more Opportune decision to
'Join ambition, a way with words, and an eagerness to learn
wdth an atmosphere that would enable him to go on from there.
Problems remained: he was still a family man, and he
had.not broken with.Cornelia although his recent behavior
had placed a good deal of strain on their marriage, and so
he knew that he was not entirely free, either to follow his
fancy or to be entirely honest, but the emphasis at least
had been shifted. The myth of the abrupt break still per-
sists, but it is not far from the essence of the truth.
Anderson had reJected the standards of the market place and

had set off to find his own.

CHAPTER III

REJECTION AND THE BEGINNING OF THE SEARCH,
1913--l919

The years following Sherwood Anderson's return to
Chicago, from early 1913 through 1919, were the single most
important period in his life. Entering them as an unknown
with vaguely defined protests against modern American ma-
terialism, a few rough manuscripts, and the urge to write
so that he might free himself from the demands of material-
ism and understand what it had done to him and to all men,
he emerged from those years regarded as one of the most pro-
mising writers of the period and one who had come close to
the essence of human experience. Combining to bring about
this result were three factors: Anderson's personal exper-
iences in the transformation of the American Midwest from an
agricultural to an industrial society; his desire to under-
Stand his experience and to write; and the atmosphere of the
Chicago to which he returned. Resulting from this combina-
tion of forces were two novels, the early manuscripts of
which he had brought with him, a book of free-verse chants,
and a collection of integrated short stories. The first
three works are the subJect of this chapter; the last merits
treatment alone.

45

47

Anderson's own experiences, as detailed in the pre-
ceding chapter, provided the raw material for much of his
life's work as well as. for the material of this, his first
creative period. More importantly, however, they provided
the problems that were at the core of his life-long search
for the understanding of American life that he first began
to seek in Elyria. Some of these were intensely personal
problems: the meaning of his father's life and his rela-
tionship to it; the problem of human isolation that he had
seen personified in the life of his mother; the secret be-
hind the human love that seemed so much at the mercy of out-
side economic and materialistic forces; and the problem of
personal identity. These, however, as Anderson was to learn,
were manifestations of universal problems made more intense
by the forces that had come to dominate the American con-
sciousness during his own lifetime. His resulting efforts
to understand them in terms of the society that had intensi-
fied them gives his lifetime work the ideological unity that
this study maintains they possess. This unity changes,
shifts its focus, and occasionally seems to back up on it-
self as various approaches turn out to be unsatisfactory,
but they continue to attack the central problem and its
numerous manifestations, and out of them he eventually deter-
mines what seems to him to be the essence of the meaning of

his experience and of the American experience. But that

 

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48

discovery is a long time in his future, at the end of a
career marked by trial, error, frustration, failure, and
solid, lasting literary accomplishment.

Anderson's desire to write of these problems and to
understand them was, as the previous chapter indicates,
much more than a mere wish or vague yen; it had taken over
control of his life so completely that at a time when he
could have been sliding easily into a comfortable middle
age, he changed the course of his life. He had provided
himself with a place of retreat as well as a means of earn-
ing a living in the advertising business, it is true, but
nevertheless he maintained only a loose and increasingly
looser tie with that anchor. His goal was to write and to
understand his world and his life, but what he needed was
direction in order to give form to his tentative efforts.
The literary renaissance in the Chicago to which he returned
provided that direction as well as the sympathy, the en-
couragement, and the stimulation that he needed if he were
to do more than fumble as he had. in Elyria.

The literary renaissance in Chicago has been ably
described by Bernard Duffey, who aptly terms it a movement
of liberation1 that was to have lasting effects on American
literature. For Anderson, as Duffey points out, Chicago

1Bernard Duffey, The Chioa o Renaissance _13 American
Letters (East Lansing, 1954,.

49

provided two things: an introduction to Gertrude Stein's
Aggie; Buttons, and the Opportunity, through the 57th Street
artistic colony, to seek out his own means of expression
through an intimate knowledge of himself.2 The impact of
the first was so great that it opened possibilities un-
dreamed of by him in Elyria, as the abrupt shift in fictional
techniques between Marching Meg; and Winesbur , _O_h___i_g shows.
His first published fiction, an innocuous short story in
flagpgg'g called ”The Rabbit Penv3 shows his earlier fumbl-
ing although it did give him a measure of local prestige,
but the Stein volume, given him by his brother Karl, was a
revelation that he remembered all his life as the first indi-
cation that he might be able to produce a style of his own.4

As Duffey points out, the 57th Street group reinforced
this sudden shock of discovery, and for Anderson it provided
two things: his realization that he was a writer and as such
had responsibilities as writer-craftsman rather themes the
propagandist-reformer he saw himself to be in Elyria and in
the two early novels; and his realization that as writer he
must be free from responsibilities he did not chose in order
to carry on his work.5 The first changed the focus of his

2Ibid., 200-201.

”Memoirs, 234. 5Duffey, 201.

 

rur-

50

efforts to write and to understand from an exercise in
purging and in preaching to an awareness of the responsi-
bilities inherent in the act of writing, while the second
provided him with the rationalization necessary for his
cavalier treatment of his advertising Job as well as for
the coming permanent break with Cornelia so that he might
be free to write. It also resulted in a mistaken view of
the meaning of freedom that led to his next marriage, to a
good deal of .posing, and to a standard of values that he
found necessary to repudiate later in M Layggter, but in
Chicago it freed him to write. Both of these discoveries,
together with the introduction to the possibilities of style
through 29.11%}: Buttons, were to control the rest of his
career. His reJection of outside responsibility, however,
disappeared in the 1920's, and in the economic chaos of the
early 1930's he acknowledged that he had to accept responsi-
bility for a world he had no part in making.

Meanwhile, to follow up his minor success in mg,
Anderson was trying to do something with the two manuscripts
he had brought with him from Elyria. It is impossible to
tell how much work Anderson had done on them in Chicago, but
in scope if not in final form they must have remained essenti-
ally unchanged, for in both, fulfillment is found in the act
of rebellion against materialistic standards, and after re-
bellion there is nothing except thevaguely-sensed fulfillment
that both protagonists find in physical intimacy with others

F u re. I .. I I -
cf.‘ .4. one I: e c we ax. ah I. t
“L v 31' “a .- AU Fm I. Y n.» vrk one
s so 50 an. up. He e .I .enw as new we of.
O
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51

and determined efforts at spiritual intimacy. Both of these
points are reminiscent of Anderson's earlier efforts at
attaining "Commercial Democracy." Both works are autobio-
graphical, the first of them, My McPherson'A _S__q_i_1, factu-
ally so, and the second, Marching Align, as Anderson the re-
former saw himself after his world of commerce became mean-
ingless in Elyria.

W_i_n_g.y McPherson'A S3316 had an interesting pro-publica-
tion history of reJection, angry exchanges between Anderson
and editors, and an enthusiastic reception in manuscript form
by the Chicago group before it was finally published in 1916
through the efforts of Floyd Dell, who had become a friend
as well as champion. In 1916 it was published by the John
Lane Company of London. As a novel it contained little of
absolute value, its real significance lying in two areas,
in his ability to recapture the essence of seemingly mean-
ingless incidents in brief sketches, and in its embryonic
recapitulation of the theme that dominated Anderson's life
work: the search for human values and meaning in a material-
istic world that he did not make but that he had been as-
duced into accepting and serving for a time.

Essentially the story is a simple one, the story of
Anderson's own life up to his reJection of materialistic
Standards in Elyria, somewhat magnified in accordance with

‘

6Sherwood Anderson, Windy McPherson'g _Sg (New York,
1916 and 1922).

 

CI)

 

52

the requirements of the American dream. A poor boy from

a small town rises, by hard work and sharp dealing, into

a position of wealth and responsibility. Later, he learns

painfully that money isn't everything. Such a story is far

from new, as Anderson realized later, but in Elyria it was

both new and heretical to him. The protagonist of the novel,

Sam McPherson, was clearly Anderson himself, and Sam's family,

especially his father and mother, are drawn from life, as are

the settings of the small Midwestern town of Caxton and the

metropolis of Chicago. The raw material of the story is the

personal experience that Anderson is trying to understand.
Sam, like Anderson, is a small-town boy from a poor

background who, partially in the effort to rise above that

background and partially as a result of the spirit of the

new materialism, is determined to rise in the world. At the

' same time Sam has a curiosity that almost becomes a hunger

for insight into the meaning of the lives around him, includ-

ing his own. The two are, of course, incompatible, and Sam

loses sight of the latter as he pursues the material success

that seems so attractive. Called "Jobby" because of his

eagerness to work and succeed, Just as Anderson was, he

attains modest success as a trader in his home town and then

Soes to Chicago, the Midwestern Mecca of ambitious country

boys at the end of the last century. In Chicago he practices

the hard work, thrift, and sharp dealing that he had learned

in his home town and rises to the top of the armament industry,

53

in the process subordinating all his human instincts to his
goal as well as marrying the boss's daughter in the finest
Horatio Alger tradition.

Suddenly his success explodes in his face as his busi-
ness practices result in his wife leaving him,and his father-
in-law committing suicide. Finding himself completely alone
and realizing that he has sacrificed human beings and human
relations for things, he decides to throw over his business
affairs and try to find the human feeling that he has lost.
After a series of adventures as a laborer, an anonymous bene-
factor of a small town, an altruistic strike leader, and a
frustrated playboy, he realizes that these efforts are futile
and that he must take a different direction. Finding a woman
who wishes to be rid of her children, he takes them home to
his wife, and together they decide to build a new life based
on love.

Such a brief outline indicatesihe parallel between
Anderson's life and that of his protagonist, but within this
framework are presented in detail the problems that made
Anderson turn to writing in the attempt to understand the
world that he had been caught up in. The first of these is
the prdblem of human isolation that dominates the book Just
an it dominated Anderson's life in Elyria after he realized
that materialism was designed not to unite people as human
beings but to exploit them as consumers. This prdblem‘be-
comes evident to the reader almost at once, although it

 

'ed.

54

takes Sam years to recognize it. Early in the novel the
problem is presented in three characters in the book, in
Sam;s father, Windy; in his mother; and in John Telfer, a
wealthy, educated man of the town who befriends Sam.

The figure of Windy McPherson is central to the story,
although Sam leaves him behind as inconsequential when he
leaves the small town behind him. As the man's nickname
implies, Windy is unable to separate reality from imagina-
tion. In the town he is a failure, Just as was Irwin Ander-
son, and this portrayal is interpreted by many critics as a
vicious portrait of Anderson's own father. Such is not the
case, however. Windy is a man completely isolated from his
wife, his children, and his contemporaries. As Windy's back-
ground shows, he has not always been that way; as a young man
he had belonged in a simpler society, but he is a man who
does not understand and does not belong in an age in which
personal worth is measured by material acquisitions. He does
not understand competition, so he is unable to compete, and
he remains a craftsman, and he becomes a wanderer and in-
creasingly a story-teller and a dreamer who is tolerated,
even liked, but not accepted by his more successful fellow
townsmen. Drawn in the image of Thomas Lincoln, he is, like
Abraham's father, a failure, and Sam, accepting the conven-
tional standards of success in his time, reJects his father

as did Abraham sixty years before, while the rest of the

55

family, including Sam's mother, accepts him as a burden
rather than as a human being. In this portrait of Windy,
Anderson is not condemning the man who does not belong;
rathen,he is drawing him as he was seen by the times, a
lazy liar rather than a wandering storyteller and crafts-
man. Sam, of course, in spite of his later realization that
he, too, was isolated from his fellow humans, never does come
to view his father in that light; for Anderson, on the other
hand, the figure of his father becomes increasingly important
until finally in the autobiographical works of the 1920's he
realizes the meaning of his father's life. Sam, however, a
manipulator rather than an interpreter, never makes the recog-
nition that Anderson's title implies, and although he knows
instinctively that there is meaning somewhere in people and
events, he is unable to go beyond that vague realization.
Feeling shame and disgust for his father, Sam is drawn
closer to his mother, but here he again faces something he is
unable to understand: her love that finds its only expression
in service. Completely dominated by her necessity to keep the
family together and fed, she is overworked, sickly, and inerti-
culate. ‘Yet her love for her children is shown graphically in
a.series of incidents dominated by the self-sacrifice that asks
nothing for herself. This is the love that Sam later tries to
recapture and understand, the love that demands nothing‘but
the opportunity to serve, but in his efforts to put it into
practice after his reJection of business ethics, he fails.

 

8 WE

er;

n!

V‘.

L1

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56

Outside his own family Sam is drawn to John Telfer,
a wealthy idler and dilettante about the town. Telfer is
the man who combines the qualities that Sam most desires
for*himself: leisure and money aswell as the ability to
indulge in.the luxuries of art and ideas. He tells Sam,
”...in our day money-making precedes many virtues that are
forever on.men's lips...money makes life livable. It gives
freedom and destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses
and well-made clothes. It brings into men's lives beauty
and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go adventuring
after the stuff of life as I have done."7

This is the lie that Sam accepts wholeheartedly, ig-
noring Telfer's true position in the town. Telfer is the
symbol of the materialistic future, no less anachronistic
than Windy and no less isolated. Telfer, by virtue of his
wealth and his education, is feared and respected, but he
is not loved in the town. As the local apostle of the new
materialism he is admired.by Sam, who fails to see that
Telfer has lost his humanity and his human.feeling, derid-
1ng love as a trap to be avoided or as a weapon to be used.
As the spokesman for the new age, Telfer promises much in
return for little, money in exchange for the love personi-
fied by Sam's mother.

Sam himself becomes isolated as a result of his ac-
ceptance of Telfer's words, and the last part of the novel

is devoted to his efforts to break through the barriers

——_

7Ib1d., 78.

u?‘

 

57

separating him from others. In a moment of despair after
his rejection.he implores, ”Are you there, 0 God? Have you
left your children here on the earth hurting each other?

Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and

the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to
wreck and hurt and destroy?"8 Later, at the end he resolves,
"'I cannot run away from life. I must face it. I must try
to understand these other lives, to love.'”9 He has finally
rejected the image of Telfer.

Out of this theme of human isolation Anderson draws
these conclusions. He sees industrial and business ethics
as conducive to the dehumanization of modern society; he
sees that man has lost all concepts of meaning in a society
dominated by superficiality; and he sees that man has lost
awareness of himself as a natural human being. That these
were in themselves problems crying for solution Anderson
seems not to recognize in the novel; rather, he implies
that the act of rejection of materialistic standards is
almost sufficient in itself to break down the barriers of
human isolation and to nullify these subsidiary problems.

 

31b1d., 323.

9This quotation appears on p. 349 in.the revised edi-
tion published by Huebsch in 1922. It shows Anderson‘s un-

successful attempt to resolve the ambiguity of the earlier
conclusion.

58

That rejection is no answer but merely a beginning, Anderson
knew well from his own eXperience, but he had no idea of
what came after that, and in the novel he sought a simpli-
fied solution in a simple event. But the situation was far
more complex than he realized, and the ending is as indeci-
sive as Anderson himself was in Elyria. In effect he had
described the beginning of a search for meaning inherent in
the American experience and had defined the area to be searched,
but he was far from its conclusion.

As a first novel and; McPherson'g §9_n has strengths
and weaknesses, both of them inherent in what Anderson was
trying to do. In attempting to lay bare the American myth,
to disclose its essential meaninglessness, and to provide a
solution to it Anderson had undertaken a job that he was un-
able to complete because he had no idea of what came next.
As such, in the overall view of Anderson's work, fling;

McPherson's Son provides an introduction that rejects Ameri-

 

can folklore so that he is free to seek the truth of the
American experience wherever it lies. The tentative answer
that.Anderson provides, that one must learn ”to understand
these other lives, to love,"10 is not the end of a search;
it is a'beginning, pointing out the future direction of his

work.

The shortcomings in the novel are numerous, so much

1°Ibig.

59

so that they tend to obscure the merits of the work. Dia-
logue is stilted, rhetorical, and unnaturak didacticism
appears all too frequently; the good portraits and sketches

in the early portion devoted to the small town are overwhelmed
by the unreality of Sam's careers as tycoon and as wanderer;
style is self-conscious, naive, and contrived, giving little
indication of Anderson's later stylistic powers; and the story
itself seems dated. Yet in spite of these shortcomings the
real significance of the novel endures. It is a novel of re-
jection and of seeking, reflecting the pattern of Anderson's
life up to that time. The ethics of the market-place had been
put behind him, and he had marked out the questions that he
was attempting to solve: the problem of the barriers between
individuals, the problem of dehumanization in a materialistic
society, and on the personal level, the problems of his own
identity, his own values, and his self-realization through
the lives of others. The weakness of the last part of the
novel indicates that he found no easy answers, but like his
Protagonist, he would continue to search them out, knowing
that if he found the answers he would find the meaning of
his own experience and of America.

Critical reception to the novel was generally favor-
able, and Anderson's prestige among the Chicago group rose
aocordingly, giving him confidence enough to branch out in
new literary directions inspired by his Chicago contacts.

In the meanwhile, however, he brought out his second novel,

 

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6O

Marching yin, also essentially a product of the Elyria years
and also an attempt to find an easy answer to the same basic
problems centering around the conflict between the individual
and his world. In this novel, however, Anderson shifts his
center of focus from a protagonist who has risen to the top
of the materialistic world only to find it meaningless, to
one who by choice remains on its lowest levels, aligning him-
self with those whom the system exploits.

In Marching Egg Anderson has again written an auto-
biographical novel, but it is autobiography of a different
sort. Instead of dealing with fictionalized fact, Anderson
bases the novel in fictionalized fancy of the sort that en-
gendered his "Commercial Democracy” movement, his secret
book "Why I Am a Socialist," and his efforts to find an
answer to the problem of what one should do after the act
of rebellion has been accomplished. The ending of M
McPherson'g S93 was inconclusive, vague, and elusive, as
Anderson was well aware, even though he did make an effort
to make it more definite in the 1922 edition. However, a
course of positive action was needed, and Anderson conceived
Marching 119g to satisfy that need. This solution, too, was
predestined to failure, as Anderson realized once he was
well into the matter and recognized the complexity of the
social and economic structure that he was trying to reform

in one easy swoop.

61

Beaut McGregor, the protagonist of Marching yen,“
essentially Sam McGregor in his determination to make his
presence felt in the world, but there is one major difference
in the motivation behind his early career. Sam was motivated
by faith in the traditional American virtues, but Beaut was
driven by hate for the people in the little Pennsylvania min-
ing town in which he was raised who were stupid enough to go
into "the black hole between the Pennsylvania hills"11 and
dig coal. Early in the novel he muses on the words of the
town socialist, "who was forever talking of a day coming when
men would march shoulder to shoulder and life in Coal Creek,
life everywhere, should cease being aimless and become defi-
nite and full of meaning."12 If such did occur, Beaut re-
flected, he would march them to an abandoned out and push
them in.

Beaut's hate resulted from his father's death in an
abandoned mineshaft, and it was intensified during a strike
when his mother, owner of a small bakery, went bankrupt
feeding the miners. During the strike he was fascinated
by the power of soldiers who marched through the streets
restoring order. Full of hate, he went to Chicago to seek
his fortune, convinced that he must take what he wanted.

1li’herwood Anderson, Marching Men (New York, 1917) ,
11.

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Later, while studying law, he realized that ”Brains are
intended to help fists!”13

At this point Beaut's career parallels Sam McPher-
son's, but again a significant difference is evident. While
Sam saw life as a game, with the rewards going to the quick-
est, the most able, and the shrewdest, Beaut saw it as a
vicious battle, with the victory going to the strongest and
most unscrupulous. Sam saw the shining mountain tops, while
Beaut focused on the debris at their base. While My E32222-
§_o_r_i'§_ §9§ reflects Anderson's disillusionment with the world
of commerce, Marching Egg;shows his bitterness at it and his
willingness to fight it on its own terms, matching brute
strength against animal savagery and cimning.14

However, the direction of Beaut's hatred shifts to the
GXploiting employers when his mother's death demonstrates to
him the love and loyalty that the miners hold for her. Hate
for the miners turns into love for them as suddenly and in-
stinctively as Sam McPherson turned for fulfillment to the
lives of others. Determined to lead them out of their misery,
Beaut fuses love, desire for freedom and dignity of the indi-
vidual, and the concept of men marching solidly together,

imbues the result with his recognition of the basic savage

13Ibia., 7a.

11;This indicates that Marching Men is probably the
Product of Anderson's last, bitter years in Elyria.

 

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63

nature of the materialistic structure, and then dreams up
the marching men movement.

The movement as it grew was force personified, taking
its strength from the mass of men who made up its body, and
again, as in the conclusion of flingy McPherson'g_§gn, Ander-
son was faced with a dilemma: after the movement, what?
After force has defeated force, is there any hope for the
individual anyway, or will he be destroyed forever by the
dehumanizing forces that were set in motion to save him?
Anderson is unable to answer the question, and the novel
concludes with the implication that the movement is doomed
and that Beaut will go down fighting with it.

However, in spite of the oftenpnoted weakness of the
second half of the novel, certain significant factors are
apparent. First, of course, is the fact that Anderson had
made a headlong attack on the basic problem that concerned
him, the dehumanizing effects of the new materialism, and
in doing so learned that there was no easy solution to it,
that he could not adapt its own weapons to a fight against
it without in the end compounding the evil. It was this
kind of realization, more than any other, that later pre-
vented him from going over to Communism when he was attracted
to it.

Another significant point that Anderson learned from
the novel is that there is no gimmick that will solve the
Imeblem of human isolation. Although in his army days he

 

I
FA-
hu-

LL}

64

had felt himself to be one of the boys as they marched to-
gether toward an objective, he found that there was danger
in such a movement. Shoulders touching did not mean that
men's souls were in harmony, as he later pointed out in A
gtggyiggllggflg‘gtggy, and a mass movement is too easily
dominated by instincts that the individual conscience re-
jects. The problem of human isolation could not be solved
by such a mere gimmick, and the direction of his future
work shows that he realized it.

Finally, the conclusion points out a significant but
ignored point that reveals Anderson's conception of the only
meaningful road for man, a concept that becomes increasingly
important in his later works, culminating in his novels deal-
ing with the class struggle of the 1930's. This is the be-
lief that man can never triumph over his materialistic en-
vironment, that he can only resist it. As the novel closes,
Beaut's counterpart among the industrialists, a rich plow
manufacturer says:

...perhaps McGregor knew he would fail and

yet had the courage of failure...What if after

all this McGregor and his woman knew both roads.

What if they, after looking deliberately along

the road toward success in life, went without

regret along the road to failure? What if

McGregor and not myself knew the road to beauty?15

Perhaps this is merely a rationalization and an en-

nobling of Anderson's decision.at the end of his Elyria

‘

15Marching Egg , 314.

55

years to reject business success and to follow his drive

to write and to understand, but the recurrence of deliber-
ately-chosen failure in the conclusions of his later works
indicates that it is more-than mere rationalization; it indi-
cates that Anderson sees the ultimate end of man as tragic
and that any meaning inherent in his life lies in the means
rather than the end. Life has meaning and hence is good if
it is expended in a cause that is worth dying for. This is
the‘belief that Ernest Hemingway accepted more than twenty
years later as Robert Jordon lay wounded but still fighting

This point satellas Anderson's continued concern with
the basic sickness in an industrial society has been lost in
the shadow of the solution that Anderson had proposed. The
image of men marching together as unthinkingly as Beaut
McGregor's followers has engendered obvious comparisons from
a.number of critics. Maxwell Geismar has commented, ”So it
isn‘t surprising that this early Anderson, motivated by
revenge and ’contempt, infatuated with 'discipline' and
'order', should arrive at an early brand of Fascism in the
last half of his novel."16 Irving Howe makes an interesting
comparison with the earlier Populism in which he saw "... an

insistently programmed mindlessness...that was sometimes its

M

16Geismar, 231.

 

f1

[‘1

66

only program..."17 Furthermore he too sees that the novel
”...uncritically anticipates the power worship, the irration-
ality, and the asexual fanaticism of modern totalitarian
pleaders..."18 James Scheville agrees, and even Anderson
says, ”It was Hitler who eventually worked out what was in
my head."19

Such criticism does seem eminently valid when one con-
siders only the movement itself, isolated from the intent of
the work as well as that of its predecessor. Lessening the
validity of this view, however, is the fact that it ignores
three points: first, the relationship between industrialism
and the individual as shown in both novels; secondly, the
barriers of inarticulateness and isolation that Anderson was
trying to overcome; and thirdly, the nature of totalitarianism
as it has been practiced. Much of the neglect with which
these factors have been met is due, of course, to the vague-
ness and indecision of the last part of the novel, but much
more is the result of failure to look beyond the surface
appearance of the movement and to see it as Anderson was

trying to present it.

17Howe, 87. 18Ibid., 85.

19Memoirs, 285. He qualified it, however: "...Hitler
did work out my idea and he didn't. There was a danger which
I did not see, the one that inheres in all ideals. It is
that beneficience or harmfulness depends on the sort of man
who puts them into practice."

1‘92!

at

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57

In the first place, the relationship between indust-
rialism and the individual, as Anderson shows in 1215.11
McPherson'g §9_n, is such that one cannot remain passively
disinterested unless he wishes to become a displaced person
like Windy. He can either go along with the system until
the price demanded for success becomes too high and then
rebell, only to find himself alone as did Sam; he can remain
at the lowest levels and suffer alone, as did Beaut's miners;
or he can attempt to organize the resistance that can meet
industrialism on its own ground, matching force against
force, and bring unity to the lonely workers in the process.
In choosing the latter course Anderson was not recommending
violence, but he was pursuing the course that Samuel Gompers
advocated and that the Knights of Labor and the later 0.1.0.
tried to put into practice: the attainment of regard for
workmen as human beings rather than as raw material through
concerted, continuous pressure. That this can become fascism
has been shown by certain unscrupulous labor leaders, but
others have shown it need not.

Anderson's concern for the barriers of isolation and
inarticulateness is a theme that recurs in his work. In
m McPherson'g _Sgg it was evident in the inability of
Sam's mother to communicate her feelings except through ser-
V1ce: it was evident in Sam's relationship with his wife:
and it was evident in Sam's search when he was unable to

convince people of his altruism during his wandering. In

‘z

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HUI-a

Q

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68

Marching Egg the problem becomes even.more serious because
Anderson is dealing with people who are not only suspicious
in their hostile environment but people who are completely
dominated by it. To overcome the barriers that exist in
such a society is not easy, except on the lowest physical
levels, as other. modern novelists as diverse as Joseph
Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas welfe, and Ernest Hemingway
have demonstrated. Anderson's solution to the problem is

to have physical and emotional unity result from the move-
ment, believing that psychological and spiritual unity would
follow. That Anderson realized he was oversimplifying is
obvious in his ending, but it was this intent that dominated
the movement. Again something much more than.power for power's
sake was intended.

The third factor ignored by those who accept the
superficial similarities between totalitarianism and the
marching men movement is the most complex, resulting in an
almost inevitable misinterpretation, not only because those
superficial similarities can easily be mistaken for intrinsic
similarities, but more importantly because the modern critic
is reading the novel in an atmosphere dominated by the spector
of Hitler's men marching over Europe in the thirties and
forties and that of Russia's troops doing the same in the
fifties. But behind the appearance of these movements and
Anderson's, certain intrinsic differences are apparent.

Success of a totalitarian movement depends primarily upon

 

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69

the deliberate isolation of an individual from his fellows.
The individual in.such a situation has only one place to

turn in a society where brother is turned against brother

and child against parent, and that is the state. As a re-
sult, the state becomes the center of the individual's world
by default if not by conviction because it has eliminated
loyalties among individuals. The members of the state appear
united as they carry out the state's dictates, but beneath
the appearance of unity there are suspicion and fear and
hence deliberately contrived isolation among men.

Anderson's movement, on the other hand, was supposed
to instill loyalty among men on every level, stemming from
their surface unity. Distrust, fighting among themselves,
and petty differences would be eliminated, and in their
place would be a spiritual affinity that would remove all
barriers between them. Thus the men would be able to achieve
meaning, dignity, and fulfillment through close association
with their fellows, and their surface unity would indicate
the depth of their actual unity. It was a fantastic assump-
tion, of course, one that provided a simple and impossible
solution to a complex and perhaps unsolvable problem, but
in.conception it was far from totalitarian.

As previously mentioned, this misinterpretation of the
central incident in the book stems not only from the above
factors but from the vagueness and indecision with which

the movement was surrounded. This was true largely because

Aka w. n
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70

Anderson did not understand the forces that such a movement
would unleash and because he was striving to transfer a
personal feeling into a positive suggestion without realiz-
ing that such an intangible thing cannot be transmutted into
a single all-inclusive event. Actually, this is the same
sort of difficulty that he found himself in at the end of
Hindi McPherson'g S92 when he attempted to solve Sam's di-
lemma by the simple act of adopting the orphans. Here it is
on.a much larger scale, dominating the last half of the book.
The event itself looms larger and larger, while the human
feeling that it was supposed to engender fails to come
through, not because it isn't there, but because Anderson's
Bkill was not sufficient to make it clearer and because
Anderson was trying to solve too many complex problems with
one broad, sweeping solution, and it simply would not work.
Hence the movement itself had to be abandoned, and in the
process Anderson learned that there are no easy answers;
that he would have to probe more deeply and be content with
solutions to phases of the overall problem.

Other weaknesses are apparent in the book, primarily
of the same sort that appeared in fliggy McPhersonflg.§gg.
Dialogue is still stilted, and unnatural rhetorical flourishes
still abound. Characterization tends to become stereotyped,
with the single exception.of Ormsby, the plow manufacturer,
leading Maxwell Geismar to state that he rather than McGregor

emerges as the true hero of the book."'30 However, in this

20Geismar, 232.

 

novel

1:
eari.

(D

71

novel Anderson has advanced in two directions beyond the
earlier work. In the first place, from an ideological
point of view, Anderson's realization that there is no
easy solution also brings him to realize that truth must
lie in another direction, in people rather than in circum-
stances. From this point he marks out a new direction for
his following and much more important work. Stylistically,
too, the novel marks an advance in that in several instances
Anderson permits himself to indulge in a release of free
verse-like rhythms, notably in the arbitrarily-inserted
passage on Chicago. He writes:

And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields

that are not disorderly. There is hape in the

corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It

shoots up out of the black land and stands up

in orderly rows. The corn grows and thinks of

nothing but growth...

And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the

corn. All men have forgotten. It has never been

told to the young men who came out of the corn

fields to live in the city.

Stylistically this is self-conscious and naive as well
as jarring in the context of the novel. Probably it is an
early product of the impact of the Chicago experiences, in-
serted in the process of revision, but it does point out the
forthcoming attempt to find a natural style of his own in
{fig-American Chants as well as his attempt in that work to

effect an ideological return to enduring aspects of the

*

21Marchigg Men, 156.

 

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72

American environment. Here, however, is Anderson's first
conscious effort at putting into practice the discovery
made through the Chicago renaissance: that a writer must
find himself and his own means of expression rather than
imitate others.

With the publication of Marching Meg Anderson has
ended one phase of his literary career and tentatively com-
menced another. This earlier phase, largely the product of
the untutored, almost isolated efforts of the Elyria years,
indicates that Anderson was trying desperately to understand
himself in relation to the standards of the times, possibly
to rationalize and certainly to explain to himself his re-
jection of those standards, and finally, vicariously, to
overthrow them and to put in their place the intimate con-
cern for man as a human being that he saw lacking in the
times. Anderson was quick to realize that both attempts
were failures. In his attempt to find fulfillment in the
act.of rebellion, as in ELEQI McPherson'§_§gn, he found that
more rejection was not enough, that the resulting void must
be filled, and that it could not be filled by desires, no
matter how strong, nor by a simple act or event. In mov-
ing beyond this point in Marching Egg he began to realize
the enormity of the problem that he had undertaken to solve
so easily, in the and indicating that it was merely an honest
if unsuccessful attempt and that if love and understanding

grav-
“Vac

73

among men could not be induced by a gimmick, nevertheless
somehow they could be attained.

In effect with the completion of Marching'Men Anderson
has completed his attempts to write fiction.based upon trans-
ferring his own experiences and daydreams directly into the
novel form. He was to write much more fiction based upon
his own experiences but in future attempts fact was to be
subordinated to the demands of his creative imagination, so
much so that even the volumes of autobiography are in effect
fact transmuted into fancy. These two novels are tentative
rather than final efforts; they are novels of rejection and
of fumbling efforts to move beyond rejection into realization,
and because of the limitations of insight under which their
author was working, they are ideological failures in their
original conception. However, as the beginning efforts of
what was to be a long literary career embracing a search for
intrinsic rather than superficial meaning in the American
experience, they are most important. Out of them Anderson
evolved the course that his future work would take.

In the novels he focused on two basic problems that
he knew he had failed to solve and that were to recur in
his work almost to the end as he realized that the problems
were more universal than he had originally supposed. The
first of these, the basic isolation of the individual, is
shown in these novels on a number of levels ranging from

the apparent intimacy of family relationships to the obvious

 

.1,

74

impersonality of industrial cities, and in future works
Anderson was to narrow his field of concentration consider-
ably. The second problem, the dehumanizing effects of modern
materialism, is not a matter of a course of action that can
be reversed as easily as it was placed in.motion but is
actually a by-product of the other more universal problem.

At this stage in his career Anderson marks his first
important shift. The two novels had been the voice of the
disillusioned businessman trying to explain to himself the
causes of his disenchantment and to propose, again primarily
to himself, a panacea for the world's ills. If he had re-
mained in Elyria after this point, content to have put his
ideas and his dreams on paper and then to settle back in
despair as they were ignored, he might have become another
Irwin Anderson or Windy McPherson, lost in a world that he
could neither accept nor understand. But two factors com-
bined to prevent this from happening. One of these was, of
course, Anderson's fascination with the power of words,
stemming from his early eXperiences at Wittenberg and in
advertising and intensified by the determined pursuit of
culture during evenings at the Anderson home; and the second
was the influence of the Chicago years after he had fled in
fact as well as in spirit from the acquisitive life.

As previously indicated, even while Anderson was
attempting to find a publisher for these two early efforts,

the influences that he found in Chicago were making themselves

 

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75

felt in a number of ways, most importantly in bringing

Anderson to regard himself as a writer rather than as a
businessmanpamateur or as a parlor radical trying to under-
mine the status quo. Two other products of the Elyria years,
the manuscripts of the novels Mary Cochran and Talbot Whitting-

22 and he began to

ham, were put aside, never to be published,
see writing as an artistic and in itself rather than as a
means to communicate or to convince as his earlier advertis-
ing training had taught him to regard it. Through the read-
ing of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and through his intro-
duction to the 57th Street literary colony, both of them
brought about by his brother Karl,23 and in keeping with what
he had learned from his writing of giggly McPherson'g _S_gn and
Marching Meg, he was literally discovering a world that the
Elyria businessman had never dreamed of. The rapidity with
which Anderson assimilated the atmosphere of personal and
artistic liberation exuded by both Stein and his new associ-
ates is indicated by the appearance of a brief essay of his
in the first issue of Margaret Anderson's Little Review,

the magazine that was the voice of the Chicago literary UV‘74
renaissance. In this essay, entitled "The New Note," Ander-
son combines facts about writing (as well as about life)

that he had instinctively perceived much earlier with the

22”Unlighted Lamps" and "The Door of the Trap" were
derived from the former, however.

23Duffey, 201.

I.

 

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76

belief in self-expression and self-trust emphasized by the
Chicago Liberation24 and proclaims a philosOphy of writing
that is to dominate his career to the end. In terms remark-
able for their self confidence after the doubt and indecision
that had torn him in Elyria, he writes:
In the trade of writing the so-called new note

is as old as the world. Simply stated, it is a

cry for the reinjection of truth and honesty into

the craft...it is an appeal from the standards

set up by money-making magazine and book publishers

...to g older, sweeter standards of the craft it-

self...

This is a mere rephrasing of the standards Anderson
had advocated in the advertising literature written in Cleve-
land, adapted from the business world to the literary, and as
such it is nothing new. Rather, it indicates Anderson's deter-
mination not to let his new career be contaminated as was the
old. It is nothing more than a pledge to resist cheapness,
no matter how profitable, and to do only what is intrinsically
worth doing. In effect Anderson had found an area in which
he could put into practice the principles of an innate honesty
that were out of place in the business world. Perhaps this
was what originally attracted him to writing; it was a field
in which he could work without concern for the standards of
the market place. From this basis, however, the rest of the

essay turns to the new spirit of self expression released by

the liberation:

 

eAlbid.

25Margaret Anderson, ed., The Little Review Anthology
(New York, 1953). 13.

77

"...In the love of his craft he‘ZEhe writeg7

has done the most difficult of all things: re-

vealed the workings of his own soul and mind."

...Whenever he finds himself baffled in drawing

a character or in judging one drawn by another,

let him turn thus in upon himself, trusting

with child-like simplicity and hoggsty the

truth that lives in his own mind.

Thus armed with a new faith that was to provide the
basis for the rest of his literary career Anderson had in
effect purged himself of his earlier view of writing as
~~merely another job of sellingzno longer viewing it as a
means of prOpagandizing, he was ready to embark upon his
new, consciously-chosen career. He was still married at
this time and he still earned his living as an advertising
writer, but these were remnants of an earlier existence that
had nothing to do with his new sense of liberation. His
marriage with Cornelia had been seriously strained when he
left Elyria, and although she brought the children to Chicago,
it was almost over in spirit if not in fact. The wife suit-
able for the ambitious young businessman was hardly the mate
for the even younger and more dedicated literary artist, and
although she tried to accept the new Anderson with good grace,
even contributing a book review to the first issue of the
little Review, the marriage could not last. In the fall of
1915 they were divorced, an event that Anderson, evidently
feeling guilty about, chose to remain almost silent on in

his published memoirs, although he and Cornelia remained on

251bid., 14-15.

g1,

78

good terms. Later he commented that "...it was this feel-
ing of dirt in life, in myself, that had destroyed my rela-
tions with my family.”7 This comment places the blame for
the breakup on the revulsion with which he regarded life in
Elyria, but the immediate cause was more likely his acceptance
of the spirit of the Liberation.

Entering whole-heartedly into this spirit of the
Chicago Liberation, Anderson. undertook to express his new-
found personal liberation in two obvious ways. His dress
became markedly colorful and unconventional, especially in
the matters of loud socks and scarves worn in place of neck-
ties; and even before his divorce he spent the summer of 1915
at Lake Chateaugay, New York, with Tennessee Mitchell, a small-
town Michigan girl turned musician, dancer, sculptress, and
epitome of the newly-emancipated modern woman. Later, in
1916, he married her, inaugerating a relationship designed,
in keeping with the spirit of liberation, to place reSponsi-
bility on neither person.

The Chicago period was the only time when Anderson led
what is conventionally considered to be a Bohemian life. The
circle of Anderson, Cornelia, and Tennessee remained on good
terms even after Cornelia took a teaching Job in Indiana, and

the three of them, together with the children, vacationed

27Memoirs, 222.

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79

together in 1916. Meanwhile Anderson's attitude toward
his copywriting Jobtacame more and more cavalier. Truly
he was pursuing the new freedom with the same determina-
tion that brought him the nickname of "Jobby" in Clyde and
the reputation of a promising young man in business. More
significant, however, than these evidences that he was tak-
ing his personal liberation so seriously was the fact that
he broke literary ties with his earlier works and branched
out in an entirely new and free direction, both in fiction
and in what was for him an entirely new field, that of free-
verse lyricism. The former resulted in Winesburg, th9,
while the latter made up his next book, Egg-American Chants,
the last of the three volumes that his contract with John
lane called for._

[Mid-American Chants is a volume representing an abrupt
shift from the nature of his previous works in two different
. directions. substantially it contains the first fruits of
the literary liberation that he had experienced in Chicago.
written probably in late 1914 and early 1915, the verses
illustrate his transition from the earlier effort to write
in a self-consciously literary and rhetorical style having
nothing to do with his own Midwestern personality to a no
less self-conscious effort to liberate his writing from
"literariness" and to allow it to seek its own natural
rhythgms. Consequently, inihe same sense that the earlier
works are the thematic forerunners of Anderson's later works,

the Chants are the stylistic ancestors from which they evolve.

80

In addition to the stylistic change that Anderson so
abruptly makes, a change in purpose is also significantly
evident. In the verses as a whole he is no longer inter-
ested in selling ideas; rather he is earnestly trying to
transfer moments of feeling, of emotion, and of what he feels
is insight from his consciousness to that of his reader. His
purpose as he states it in the mm of the slender volume,
is to sound a note of affirmation in the American scene, to
explore the "...few memory haunted places"28 that have been
hidden by the coal piles and slag heaps of an industrial
civilization and to celebrate them, hoping that in the pro-
cess he can set free the spirit of the American people by
ridding their consciousness of the sordidness of materialism
and puritanism so that they, too, may be able to sing freely.

The resulting collection of verse is so free and so
unformed that it becomes not only trying but tiresome; as
verse, it is insignificant, but from the point of view of
Anderson's literary and thematic development it is the most
important of his earlier works. The two-fold shift, in
style and in regarding his native experiences as meaningful
and worthwhile, lays the groundwork for the outstanding
short stories that follow it; hence, in a very real sense
the new freedom made it possible for him to discover him-
self both as writer and as interpreter of the Midwestern

experience.

A L—

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Indications of his newly-found freedom from conven-
tional imitative literary styleabound in the volume, much
of it out of place in what is supposed to be pure and spon-
taneous lyricism. Often, however, it seems peculiarly right
as he feels his way toward the essence of Midwestern feeling
expressed in its native idiom; for example, in "Song of In-
dustrial America" he writes, "Now here's how it's going to
come--the song, I mean. I've watched things, men and faces
--I know."29 Continuing, he writes:

First there are the broken things--myself and

the others. I don't mind that--I'm gone--shot to

pieces. I’m part of the scheme--I'm the broken

and of a song myself...Now, faint voices do lift

up. They are swept away in the void--that's true

enough. It had to be so from the very first.

Pshawb-I'm steady enough-~1et me along. Keokuk,

Tennessee, Michigan, Chicago, Kalamazoo-~don't

the names in this country make you fairly drunk?

We'll stand by this brown stream for hours. I'll

not be swept away. Watch my hand--how steady it

is. To catch this song and sing it would do much
--make much clear.30

Taken out of the arbitrary verse arrangement in which
they were published, verses such as these are not poetry by
any stretch of the imagination; they do, however, belong to
a tradition that is much older--the tradition of oral story- .
teller, the man whose purpose it was to seek and to hold the
attention of his listeners while he found his way through to
the point that he was trying to make. This is the tradition
of the Middlewest of the eighties and nineties, when the count-

less counterparts of Irwin Anderson were holding court in the

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harness shape, the general stores, and the barber shops
scattered across the rural countryside, and when Anderson
turned his writing loose to seek its own natural style, it
turned instinctively to that tradition. Often exasperating
in its meandering way and hence unsatisfactory to a modern
reader accustomed to crisp directness, nevertheless it is a
true rendition of a native Midwestern technique that is not
studiously correct but spontaneous, unsophisticated, and
honest. As a result it is a style that would naturally
attract a man who declared himself to be tired of dishonesty,vx
artificiality, and trickery in the use of words as well as

in normal human affairs.

Contrasting with this are instances in which the speech
is forced and unnatural, stemming from efforts to be poetic-
ally profound, as when he writes, ”Into the cities my people
had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words choked
them. They could not breathe,"31 but even here the artificial
sonorousness is punctuated by the hard, direct language of a
rural people. Words like "dizzy" and "choked" are hardly
Poetic, but they are both functional and right for the people
and the places to which Anderson was to devote himself. In
keeping with the spirit of the Liberation, which demanded
that the artist look to himself for the means of expression
suitable to the fusion of experience, emotion, and intuition
that he is trying to put into words, Anderson has discovered

311bid. , 11.

 

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one of the individual talents that he as a craftsman of
words will bring to its own appropriate perfection in
future works. Here in the Chants, in a medium to which

it is not suited it results in a markedly naive and un-
successful literary effort; when consciously adapted to

the form from which it was derived and for which it is most
suited, the short tale, it becomes something more, as Ander-
son was to show in his later works.

The second major shift in direction that occurs in
this work is also significant as a point of departure for
his later works. In both of the earlier novels Anderson
had been so overwhelmed by the evils that he was trying to
combat that he could see nothing else. The rural country-
side, the peaceful atmosphere of the small town, the order
and beauty and fertility of a field of growing corn were
ignored by the young man on the make and the hater devoted
to crushing the thing that he hated; but in the freedom of
form in this volume Anderson permits himself to pause, to
look around, and to see that in spite of the industrial
monster dominating the American scene, there is much un-
touched by it that is both good and enduring. He has not
forgotten industrialism; it concurrently fascinates him and
repells him, recurring in the imagery of verses like "Song
to New Song,” sung in the face of fiery furnaces, coal heaps,
and a sky black with smoke. It exists, but it is unimportant
1n the light of the important things that he and his people

84

had neglected in the novels and to which he now wants to
return, taking his people with him.

This concept makes up the major thematic expression
of the volume. In "The Cornfields" he sets up his purpose,
to call to attention the health, vitality, and fertility
that America posesses but has lost sight of; "Song of In-
dustrial America” carries the idea further by focusing on
the human things, place names evocative of those strengths
and human lives made up of them, that also have been ignored
and that must be revived. Even beyond this Anderson pro-
claims that we are one with our past and our environment
and that we must recognize this kinship. In "Song of Cedric
the Silent" Anderson bridges the gaps between these things
by proclaiming spiritual unity in a manner adopted from
Whitman's "Song of Myself."

Throughout the Chants Anderson celebrates whatever he
sees to be right and natural, pointing out that the people
and the earth exist and that they are good. Much of this
celebration is couched in the sexual symbolism of Walt Whit-
man, as in ”Song of Theodore," and in his recurring use of
corn as a symbol not of order as in the brief passage in
Marching Mgn but of fertility inherent in the American scene
and waiting for whoever is willing to seek it out. He con-
cludes the volume with "Evening Song” and "Song of the Singer"
in which he returns to the open fields that hold so much pro-
mise and then defies the might of the industrial machine. In

 

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the former he concludes with hope and trust in the Midwest-
ern countryside; in the latter he proclaims his faith.

As the volume stands it was one that Anderson had to
write. At the conclusion of Marching Men he acknowledged
that a frontal assault on the forces of materialism was
futile and that humanism could not win without giving up
its essence and becoming what it was attempting to destroy.
Yet he ended on a note of faith as he had in Windy McPhersonflg
§gg. Somewhere, he knew, there was something that would in-
still meaning into lives and break down the barriers between
them, but desire, no matter how strong, or action, no matter
how sustained, could not do it. One thing remained: to probe
into the American consciousness, to find what was true, and to
make it known. In effect he is doing what Sam McPherson set
out to do in his wandering, to discover for himself what was
lasting in America, but he was not trying to do it by direct
action, as businessmen McGregor and Anderson had been trained
to attempt; rather, he was seeking understanding instead of
cures. If he were successful the walls between peOple would
not be demolished by brute force; they would be undermined
and collapse of their own weight.. Mid-American Chants marks
this change in approach, essentially for Anderson a change
from reformer and propagandist to artist.

~Here in Mid-American‘ghggtg Anderson no longer advo-
cates open rebellion but rather acknowledges and deplores

the presence of industrialism and then turns his back on it

 

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to find meaning and fulfillment in the phenomena of his own
Midwest, an environment that he finds is remarkably adapted
to solving the problems inherent in American life. In so
doing the direction of his search for meaning has become
clearly defined, and he turns deliberately away from the
battleground of the cities in order to learn to understand
the American past and the innermost lives of American indi-
viduals, hoping to find in the process whatever it is that
isolates man from his fellows and makes him such an easy
prey for the philosOphy of materialism.

As a book of verse, Mid-American Chants is "perhaps
as bad a case of maundering and abortive work as the whole
Chicago Liberation, so ready in formless effusion, was to
produce;"32 liberty had been too readily interpreted to mean
license by Anderson as well as his colleagues, and although
the resulting free verse style that is related more closely
to prose than to verse has shown Anderson the way to a new
literary style reproducing the flat, meandering Midwestern
idiom, it does not result in the lyricism that was intended.
Rather it results in awkwardness, repetitiousness, and monotony ‘
instead of spontaneous expression. From this point of view
the book is a failure as a whole, the few genuine lyrics in
it insufficient to redeem it. However, from the point of

view of Anderson's literary development it is a success

32Duffey, 203.

87

because in it Anderson has discovered both himself and
his material. No longer seeking fulfillment either in
rebellion or in prOpagandizing against the forces he hates
and fears, he is seeking it in a conscious effort to know,
understand, and embrace his own Midwest and the people who
make it live. 8

Although writing under the obvious influences of Whit-
man and Sandburg, alternately celebrating the American scene
through an eXpanded consciousness of the things that make it
up and retreating into meaningful and isolated segments of
it, Anderson went beyond them in displaying not merely ac-
ceptance and sympathy but in showing that although the short-
comings of the new materialism did exert such power, there
was hope that they might be overcome by a return to apprecia-
tion of the basic values and virtues of the unspoiled pre-
industrial American spirit. Hence, America in the Chants
is no longer the hostile place that he had depicted in the
earlier works, but, epitomized by the Midwest, it has be-
come a source for sympathetic appraisal by a new Anderson
giving free reign to an imaginative, sensitive, and sympa-
thetic appreciation of a geographic area seen from a com-
pletely fresh point of view. As he concluded the 222222:
he had accepted this new view of the area he knew so well,
and he had accepted his new role as artist-interpreter of

its people who thereby become his.

88

Even while he was releasing himself in unrestrained
and undisciplined lyricism in the verses that were to be-
come gig-American Chants Anderson's newly-awakened sensitiv-
ity toward the psychological and spiritual depths was be-
coming evident in the short fiction that he was writing
between 1914 and 1916. His first published short story,
"The Rabbit Pen," as previously indicated, was an innocuous
attempt at fusing the symbolism of a buck rabbit running
wild in his pen and the improbable love affair of a writer.
The fusion is unsuccessful, the symbolism remains hazy, and
Anderson is forced to rely on a trick ending. In Spirit if
not in actual fact, this story is a product of the Elyria
years, when Anderson was concerned with telling about people
and events rather than showing them in depth in writing.
From this point, however, changes became increasingly evi-
dent as he shifts from a manipulator of words to an artist
who refuses to do tricks with them and from a man concerned
with.making a point at all costs to one concerned with under-
standing his people through close attention to psychological
rather than surface detail.

This development is illustrated in two of the earlier
stories that he contributed to Egg Little Review. The first
of these, "Sister,"33 published in December of 1915, shows

33Sherwood Anderson, "Sister," The Little Review II
(1360., 1915), 3-40

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a complete rejection of the artificiality and contrivance
of the earlier story. Closely related to the impression-
ism of the poems, although still vague and indecisive, it
nevertheless depends upon force of style and of psychologi-
cal insight to create its effect. As a story it is weak,
but it indicates clearly the direction in which he is mov-
ing.

Following this, the story "Vibrant Life,"34 is a semi-
autobiographical attempt to lay bare the essence of a man
who breaks away from convention only to find himself trapped
again. Finally in a macabre scene he attacks a young woman
who is sitting with him in the presence of his dead brother;
the coffin breaks open, the body rolls to the floor, and the
protagonist leers triumphantly at the young woman. The symbol-
ism is heavy-handed and awkward and the story is fantastic,
but it was a step closer to the stories of Winesburg, Ohio.
Increasingly he was becoming interested in the inner secrets
of'human life, the twists, the quirks, and the secrets that
make communication between individuals so difficult, and he
was moving slowly in the direction that would bring them to
light in his work. The short fiction of this period pro-
vided the apprenticeship in form that he needed, just as the

failures in the novels turned him inward and the Chants

34Sherwood Anderson, ”Vibrant Life," The Little 5&-
view 111 (March, 1916), 10-11. " '—

90

taught him that he had both style and increasingly trust-
worthy perceptiveness within himself.

The importance of the influence of Gertrude Stein and
of the Chicago Liberation group cannot be over-emphasized
in bringing about this shift in Anderson's literary direction,
both in style and in focus, but other factors were also at
work. One of these was his awakened interest in painting,
not as a means of expression but primarily because he was
interested in color and in the endless possibilities for
effect that color provided. As art, his canvasses were
meaningless in spite of the fact that the Radical Book Shop
gave him a one-man show,35 and Anderson was not deluded into
thinking otherwise. But the possibilities inherent in color
indicated to him the equally endless potentialities inherent
in the words of his own craft.36

Another influence of this period was his discovery of the
rhythmic cadences of the Bible, an effect that he tried to
secure in his own experimental work. One day he startled
the copy room at the agency by announcing that he "was sold
on Jesus Christ."37 He was not referring to theology or
even to morals, but the music that fascinated him in the
New Testament, and he wrote a number of prose poems in which

he tried to capture it.

35Not until 1920, however.

35Sehev111, 84-85. 37Ib1d., 85.

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91

These factors were primarily stylistic influences;
however, his friendship with Trigant Burrow, a pioneer
psychoanalyst, brought into sharper focus his increasing
interest in the inner workings of the human mind. He had
met Burrow during the summer of 1915, and their friendship
became close.38 However, Anderson's interest by this time
was not in curing but in understanding the 1118 as well as
the strengths of the human heart, and although he approached
psychoanalytical techniques in many cases, he relied primar-
ily on his own intuition to ferret out the essence of human
character, thereby maintaining his primary interest in under-
standing rather than merely revealing the human soul. How-~
ever, detailed discussion of the influence of psychoanalysis
on his work is better reserved for the later works, when
sexual repression and domination begin to play a major role,
but its influence is evident in the Winesburg, thg_collection.

During the time when these influences were most active,
in late 1915 and throughout 1916, he had begun to work on the
stories that were to make up Winesburg, thg, but as yet he
had no idea of their potential as an organic whole. At the
same time he was straining at the ties that held him to Chicago.
His advertising work had become almost free-lance, and the
Liberation group itself was breaking up as the drift to New

Ybrk‘began. The early volumes had brought him a measure of

38Duffey, 200.

92

fame and respect in the East, and he began to look in that
direction, spending more and more time out of Chicago until
he began again a period of restless wandering that occupied
most of the 1920's.

His association with the Chicago Liberation had served
its purpose, and he felt enough confidence in himself and in
his work to strike out on his own. During the almost five
years of close association with the Chicago group he had
changed from a lone reformer trying single-handedly to attack
and overthrow a country dominated by the impersonal forces
of materialism to a writer who had come to regard his craft
not as a weapon but as a means of expression. This shift
had been brought about almost entirely through the influence
of the Chicago years, and as their hold on him started to
loosen, he was about to put into final form the work that
these influences had combined to produce out of his native
ability. By the end of 1918, he had served an effective
literary apprenticeship, and his next published work was to
bring him recognition as a master of American writing, a
reputation that has endured in association with this work in
spite of the many fluctuations of critical estimate of the
works preceding and following it.

As the publication of Winesbur , thg_approached,
Anderson had come a long way from a frustrated and embittered
businessman who was trying to find personal fulfillment and
meaning through condemning and attacking the American business

not.

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93

civilization to a promising writer with three published
books behind him and an enthusiastic if small audience
awaiting his next. At this point he had found himself in
three ways: he had found himself as an honest writer-
craftsman rather than an increasingly hypocritical and dis-
illusioned businessman; he had found the beginnings of a
style that was to reflect both himself and the Midwestern
world of which he realized he was intrinsically a part; and
he had found that beneath the seeming meaninglessness and
ugliness of the industrial and commercial surface of America,
there was still a solid core that was worthwhile. This core
and its most obvious manifestation in the peeple who had not
sold their individualism for material gain was to be the next
area that he would explore, not in complete acceptance but in
an honest and intense effort to understand. From Sam McPher-
son's abortive efforts to love without understanding, he had
learned that understanding and compassion had to precede
love, and in the Winesbur ,‘th2 stories he was to find all
three.

At this stage of his career Anderson had discovered
the major direction of his life's work, a direction that is
epitomized in the themes he is to pursue, all of them stem-
ming directly from his continued concern for man both as
individual human being and as member of society. These
themes are not new; they are merely intensifications and

clarifications of the unrest and dissatisfaction he had

94

felt in Cleveland and Elyria. The theme of meaning in a
society dominated by superficiality and the theme of man's
loss of awareness of himself as a natural being play sub-
ordinate roles in his next work, waiting until later for
their full expression. In Winesburg, Ohio he once more
plunges headlong into the problem of the isolation of the
individual human being, but this time he is not a frustratedj

polemicist; he is a conscious literary artist.

CHAPTER IV
MOMENTS OF INSIGHT

In 1919 Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, gggg,

a collection of short stories and sketches written between
late 1915 and late 1917, the years during which the influ-
ences of the Chicago Renaissance had their strongest impact
upon him. In the collection he has fused successfully for
the first time the elements of his Chicago discoveries

about himself and his chosen work; he has passed beyond

mere dissemination of prOpaganda and explanation, gone far
beyond self-expression, and produced a mature piece of liter-
ary art.

In the Winesburg, thg achievement, relationships to
Anderson's earlier work are immediately apparent: in sub-
ject matter he has returned to the small Midwestern town
that had provided the background for the earlier parts of
311.1511 McPherson'_s_ _§_g_1_1_; in theme he is primarily concerned
with the isolation of the individual as he had been to a
lesser extent in the first two novels; and in technique he
has combined his natural Midwestern style with the short
form that he had been experimenting with in the short stories
for The Little Review. But to say that Anderson merely com-

bined all these factors and emerged with a major literary

95

96

achievement is to over-simplify to an unacceptable degree;
there is no intermediate work between his earlier unsuccess-
ful attempts and Winesburg, thg_that would show that Ander-
son was consciously striving for the literary effect that he
achieved in the volume.

Anderson himself has attempted to account for the abrupt
shift from mediocre to substantial achievement several times,
most recently and in detail in the Memoirs.1 According to
him the first of the stories, "Hands," was written in its
entirety at one sitting as the result of a moment of intense
emotional excitement. For days he had been sitting at the
window of his room in his boarding house, watching people
pass by. ”Somehow it had seemed to me...that each person
who passed along the street below...shouted his secret up to
me. I was myself and still I fled out of myself. It seemed
to me that I went into the others."2

This must have been just before or shortly after he
had completed the Mid-American Chants volume, in the writing
of which he had consciously and deliberately released in him-
self the spontaneous lyricism that can only be the product of
emotional release and the desire to probe deeply into the
meanings of things as reflected in one's self. At this time,

as he had in the past, even in the years in Cleveland and

lMemoirs, 279-280 and 287-288.

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Elyria, he found himself drawn strongly to the people with
whom he felt so much sympathy. He was "Trying for some-
thing. To escape out of old minds, old thoughts put into
my head by others, into my own thoughts, my own feelings."3
Thus far what he had been attempting was very much in keep-
ing with the spirit of the Chicago Liberation, to look into
his own heart and to understand others through himself, as
he had emphasized in his essay ”The New Note” a year or so
before. Now he wanted to go farther:

To at last go out of myself, truly into others,
the others I met constantly in the streets of the
city, in the office where I then worked, and still
2;EEIEAnr:::?Eezggnfgt of my childhood in an
Suddenly it happened. He went to his table and wrote,

finishing ”Hands" at one sitting, knowing when he had
finished that it was right, that he had captured the es-
sence of ”...a poor little man, beaten, pounded, frightened
by the world in which he lived into something oddly beauti-
ful."5 When he knew that it was right, he knew also that

he had found both himself and his vocation, "Getting for

the first time belief in self.”6 In the succeeding days and
weeks he finished the rest of the stories, writing furiously

at work, in his room, or wherever he could find a moment.

31bid. 4Ibia. SIbid. 61bid., 280.

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Whether this account is factually correct or not7
really doesn't matter. What had happened was that Anderson
had attained artistic insight in a form eminently suited to
his own peculiar talents for attaining empathy with other
human beings. It is not a thing which can be sustained for
long periods of time, certainly not throughout a novel, al-
though flashes of it occur in almost all of his following
novels, but in the short forms it is superb. Thus Anderson
had found, almost by accident, the form best suited for his
ability, one in which he could fuse sympathy, insight, and
lyrical excitement and in the process lose consciousness of
self in the production of the work.

The last phrase contains the key to Anderson's achieve-
ment in the ensuing volume, to be discussed later in dealing
with the figure of George Willard, the major unifying figure
in the collection. Anderson had been dealing in his earlier
works with himself, directly in the case of Sam McPherson
and vicariously in the figure of Beaut McGregor. Here he
has used the fruits of his personal experience as he had in
the novels, but his experiment in MigpAmerican Chants had
shown him that more experience was not enough, that there
was something beyond it, and in Winesburg he goes beyond
his own experience into an intuitive perception of the

experience of others.

_—

. 7Anderson tells a somewhat different version on pp.
287- 288 o

99

Hence, in dealing with other human lives he has passed
the surface appearance of each and caught it at a moment
that reveals its essence. As he commented, it is as though
each person had shouted its secret up to him. Each story is
a moment in the life of the central figure, but in that mo-
ment Anderson reveals the secret that made that life what it
was.

Incorporating these isolated moments of insight into
an integrated whole presents a problem in categorizing the
volume into one of the convenient pigeonholes of literary
convention. It has been called both a novel and a collec-
tion of short stories, and Anderson himself always called
each element a story, but in its entirety he considered it
a novel in a form invented by himself rather than in the de-
rivative form of his earlier works.8 In the Memoirs he re-
calls that

I have even sometimes thought that the novel

form does not fit an American writer, that it is

a form which had been brought in. What is wanted

is a new looseness; and in Winesburg I have made

my own form. There were individual tales but all

about lives in some way connected. By this method

I did succeed, I think, in giving the feeling of

the life of a boy growing into young manhood in a

town. Life is a loose flowing thing. There are

no plot stories in life. I had begun writing of

the little lives I knew, ghe people I had lived,
walked. and talked “these

8Anderson's debt to Edwin Arlington Robinson's;
"Tilbury Town” poems and Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River
Anthology" has long been recognized, however.

9Memoirs, 289.

4

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100

Again, whether this new form was a conscious contri-
vance at the time, as Anderson here indicates it was, or not
makes very little difference. The form is, as he comments,
a loose ene, having elements that draw the stories together,
but within the unity thus imposed, there is the diversity
inherent in the dozens of lives portrayed, each of them
different from the others, and all of them different from
Anderson's own. The result is in a very real sense Ander-
son's first work that is undeniably fiction rather than auto-
biography.

The difficulty in ascribing a conventional category to
the volume has resulted in a number of mistaken interpreta-
tions of the work, the most common being that Anderson is
showing a cross section of a small town, revealing its secret
sins in such detail that he is in effect "revolting from the
village," as Carl Van Doren10 and Russell Blankenshipll have
commented. Although this was an early attempt to categorize
the book, the generality has endured, in spite of the fact
that it is far from what Anderson had either intended or
accomplished. Anderson was not writing about any particular
social setting, nor was he attacking the social structure as

he had in his earlier works. Rather he was writing about

loCarl Van Doren, Contem orar American.Novelists
1200-1220 (New York, 19225. 153.

llRussell Blankenship. American Literature (New York,

1931), 671.

1

101

people, exploring deeply and in detail individual human
lives in the attempt to set aside the barriers of human
isolation and to discover them as individuals, at the same
time discovering whatever it was that had erected those
barriers. That the individuals he portrays are neither
unique products either of the small town or of the large
city but common to both is demonstrated by his own state-
ment that many of the characterizations came from ”...every-
where about me, in towns in which I had lived, in the army,
in factories and orr1ces,"12 and from William Phillips's
study that shows its relationship to Clyde and E1yr1a.13
The work is a composite, drawing for its substance on all
of Anderson's experience, but it is not an attempt to de-
scribe or to explain any one. Anderson had left such
attempts behind him as a result of what he had learned from
the novels.

The book is in essence an exploration of the problem
of human isolation; however, it does not approach the pro-
blem from the sweeping social-structure centered view of
the earlier novels but from a much narrower point of view.
Anderson has learned that isolation is not merely a pro-
duct of modern materialism, as Marchipg Men implies, but

that it originates in a narrowness of human vision and an v .

-hfi‘ _. ,_i

l2Memoirs, 205.

13William Phillips, Sherwood Andersonfg Winesburg,
Ohio (University of Chicago, 19195.

102

inability or in some cases an unwillingness to grapple with
and attempt to understand the complexities of human life
and experience. These shortcomings result in a self-cent-
ered world that precludes the understanding of others. His
earlier protagonists, failing to realize this truth, had
been unable to penetrate the barriers of isolation because
they were attempting to approach others as extensions of
themselves rather than as individuals; hence they became
caricatures of the epic figures they might have been. In
the short stories ofthis volume Anderson has narrowed his
field and has determined to treat isolation as a phenomenon
of the individual in an individual sense rather than as a
manifestation of a social evil. That it cannot be cured by
an all-embracing remedy, he learned from Marching Men; Sam
McPherson taught him that it cannot be understood by a
direct, determined approach. Now, in Winesburg, thg,
Anderson is approaching the problem in its simplest indi-
vidual terms, seeking understanding through intuitive per-
ception of the essence of individuality.

In the first of the sketches, "The Book of the Gro-
tesque,” utilized as a statement of purpose, Anderson points
out his approach in symbolic terms. As the title indicates,
he points out that the individuals “he is dealing with in the
stories have each been twisted into psychological shapes
having, in most cases, little to do with external appearance.
This distortion results from both the narrowness of their

103

own vision and that of others; in some cases the first is
primarily at fault, while in others it is the latter. From
this point the problem inherent in human isolation takes on
two aspects: the first is, of course, the specific cause
in individual cases; the second and more important is deter-
mining with exactness and hence understanding the nature of
each grotesque. Thus, in the book he is approaching the
understanding that McPherson sought in a way that demands
empathy, compassion, and intuition rather than fierce desire.
In this sketch, which characterizes an old writer who
has attained understanding of his fellow men and has retired
from life to observe men and to teach them understanding,
Anderson defines his problem symbolically because he has
learned that there is no direct, obvious cause but that there
are causes as diverse as the individuals who make up the
world. In the sketch the old writer reveals his secret know-
ledge of the nature of mankind, noting .
That in the beginning when the world was young
there were a great many thoughts but no such
thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself
and each truth was a composite of a great many
vague thoughts. All about in the world were
the truths and they were all beautiful.
...There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of
profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds
and hundreds...were the truths and they were all
beautiful.
And then the peOple came along. Each as‘he

appeared snatched up one of the truths and same
who were quite strong snatched up a dozen.of them.

104

It was the truths that made the people gro-

tesques...the moment that one of the people took

one of the truths to himself, called it his truth,

and tried to live his life by it, he became a gro-

tesque and the truth he embraced became a false-

hood.14

Using this symbolic interpretation as a basis, Anderson
sets off to use intuitive perception to try to find in the
lives of the people with whom he is dealing whatever it is
in themselves that has prevented them from reaching their
full potential as human beings and that has cut them off from
their fellows. He shows, too, his realization that the cause
’is not something as easily perceived and denounced as modern
industrialism but that it is as old as the human.race. False
ideas, false dreams, false hopes, and false goals have dis-
torted man's vision almost from the beginning; Anderson is
attempting in the stories to approach these people who have
had such indignities inflicted upon them as to become spirit-
ual grotesques, and most importantly, he is attempting to
understand them as people rather than as curious specimens
of spiritual deformity.

Anderson's use of the word grotesque is quite important

in this context.15 In its usual sense in reference to human

 

4-5 14sherwood Anderson, Winesbur , Ohio (New York, 1919).

15Although critics have attributed the origin of Ander-
son' s use of the term "grotesque” to adaptation from Poe‘ s
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesgue, a more likely explana-
tion is that it came from the play Grotesgues by Cloyd Head

105

beings it connotes disgust or revulsion, but Anderson's use
is quite different. To him a grotesque is, as he points out
later, like the twisted apples that are left behind in the
orchards because they are imperfect. These apples, he says,
are the sweetest of all, perhaps even because of the imper-
fections that have caused them to be rejected. He approaches
the people in his stories as he does the apples, secure in
his knowledge that the sources or natures of their deforms
ities are unimportant when compared to their intrinsic worth
as human beings needing and deserving of understanding. This
approach is based on intuition rather than objective know-
ledge, but it is the same sort of intuition with which one
approaches the twisted apples: one dare not reject because
of mere appearance, either physical or spiritual; that ap-
pearance may mask a significant eXperience made more intense
and more worthwhile by the deformity itself.

In the body of the book proper, following this intro-

ductory sketch, Anderson has set up an organizational pattern
that not only gives partial unity to the book but explores

 

and Maurice Brown. This play was produced at the Chicago
Little Theatre in 1915, and Anderson was undoubtedly familiar
with it because a review of it appeared in Th2 Little Review
II (Dec., 1915), 38-40, the same issue that contained Ander-
son's "Sister." Also, the use of the term in the play suggests
Anderson's later use of it. In the play a sardonic artist
manipulates his characters, called grotesques, who are pre-
sented as marionettes until they perceive what is being done
to them, turn on the artist and rebel. The concept of re-
bellion of grotesques shows up in some of Anderson's stories
written late in the Chicago period and incorporated in later
collections.

 

'11

106

systematically the diverse origins of the isolation of his
people, each of whom is in effect a social displaced person
because he is cut off from human intercourse with his fellow
human beings. The first section of the book deals with

three aspects of the problem of human isolation, one in each
of the first three stories. The first story, "Hands", deals*
with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, ”Paper
Pills,” is devoted to the ability to communicate thought; and
the third, "Mother," focuses on the inability to communicate
love. This three-phased examination of the basic problem of
human isolation sets the tone for the rest of the book be-
cause these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the
narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily
from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of
each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in
human nature. Each of the three characters has encountered
one aspect of the prOblem: he has something that he feels
is vital and real within himself that he wants desperately
to reveal to others, but in each case he is rebuffed, and
turning in upon himself, he becomes a bit more twisted and
worn spiritually. But, like the apples left in the orchards,
he is the sweeter, the more human for it. In each case the
inner vision of the main character remains clear, and the
thing that he wishes to communicate is in itself good, but
his inability to break through the shell that prevents him

 

9
Y
A;

(I)

107

from talking to others results in misunderstanding and
spiritual tragedy.

The first of the stories, "Hands,” immediately and
symbolically approaches a problem that as a phase of the
overall problem of human isolation recurs in Anderson's
later work. The story begins by describing the remarkably
active and eXpressive hands of an old recluse in the town.
George Willard, a young reporter on the Winesburg Egglg and
the unifying figure in the stories, is fascinated by the old
man's hands, and in time the old man tells Willard his story:
once, as a schoolmaster, he had been accused of homosexuality
because in moments of excitement or affection he would tousle
the hair of his students or touch them. Thus, instead of
being a source of expression, the old man's hands had become
a source of shame to him, and he tried to keep them hidden.
In the town he is a pitiful and fearful creature, always
eXpecting the spontaneous actions of his hands to be mis-
interpreted.

The concept of hands as the basic tools of expression
of the craftsman is very important in this story as it passes
beyond the immediate and takes on overtones of the universal.
As Anderson points out with increasing frequency during both
this and the next periods of his career, man's efforts to
communicate with his fellows have traditionally depended
upon.his hands because for many things words either do not

exist or have been rendered meaningless. Hence, the hands

108

of a craftsman, a painter, a surgeon, a writer, a lover
communicate indirectly something of the truth and beauty
that each of them feels inside. Although Anderson is fasci-
nated by the idea, nevertheless he knows that the language
of hands is as subject to misinterpretation as any other.

In this story he points out that this is not only possible,
but it is probable, that the widely-held truth in this case,
the existence of homosexuality, has become a falsehood because
appearance has been accepted in place of truth. Symbolically
he shows how such widely-held truths become falsehoods have
inhibited the forces in man that allow him to eXpress himself
intimately and creatively. Fortunately, however, he shows
that the force still exists, making its possessor the more
human and the more deserving of compassion for it, although
isolation has deprived him of the power to express his
creativity.

In "Paper Pills" Anderson again writes of the relation-
ship between a man's hands and his inner being, this time in
the person of Doctor Reefy, a conventionally wise and per-
ceptive country practicioner. Doctor Reefy is as cut off
from effective communication with others as Wing Biddlebaum,
but his problem is his inability to communicate his thoughts
without being misunderstood. Because he recognizes this
shortcoming, he writes his thoughts on bits of paper, puts
the bits into his pockets, where they become twisted into
hard little balls, which he throws playfully at his friend

the nurseryman as he laughs.

109

Here Anderson carries further his introductory comment
that there is no such thing as a truth, that there are only
thoughts, and that man has made truths out of them through
his own short sight. On the bits of paper Doctor Reefy
knows that he is writing mere thoughts, but he knows that
they would be misinterpreted if communicated directly, so
to prevent them being reduced to the grim joke of misinter-
pretation he prefers that they become the means of a lesser
joke in the form of paper pills. Cut off from attempts at
direct communication through his knowledge of its inevitable
misinterpretation, Doctor Reefy prefers that his paper pills
be considered as bits of paper and no more; in effect, the
hard shells of the pills represent the barriers of isolation
that surround human minds, and Doctor Reefy, voluntarily iso-
lating himself rather than trying to overcome those barriers,
deliberately avoids inevitable misunderstanding.

Waldo Frank sees this story as representing the in-
effectuality of human thought as it is isolated and frag-
mented on the bits of paper,16 but Anderson indicates no
such shortcoming in the thoughts themselves. The difficulty,
he points out, lies in the process of communication, which,
as Reefy indicates, is something that cannot be carried out

directly with any assurance of success. Rather than risk

16Waldo Frank, ”Winesbur , Ohio After Twenty Years,"
Story XIX (Sept. - Oct., 1952). 30.

110

misinterpretation, he lets the paper pills be considered
products of his hands rather than his mind. Yet, even
while he throws them playfully at his friend, he hopes that
his friend will see them in the light in which every crafts-
man hopes his work will be regarded--as a product that has
taken shape through the work of his hands but that is ex-
pressive of his soul. Reefy knows that this intuitive under-
standing is as unlikely as direct understanding, and so he
lets himself become a grotesque because he is unable to find
a satisfactory means of communication. The shortcoming lies
not in the thought but in the process of communication, and
he prefers to convey his thought ironically in the form of
a joke, even while he knows that faulty communication of the
intimacies of human life is life's inherent tragedy.

The third story, "Mother," deals with the relationship
between George Willard and his mother, Elizabeth Willard.
In effect the story is the eXploration of a theme that
Anderson had adapted from his own experience and used in
both.Wlngy McPherson'g_§gn,and.Marching Egg: the inability
to communicate love or understanding between mother and son.
The relationship between the two is completely inarticulate,
just as it was between mother and son in each of the novels
and, more importantly, as Anderson's autobiographies show
was the case between him and his own mother. As a result,
although this phase is part of the overall problem of iso-
lation, Anderson feels that understanding in this area is

 

111

vital. As the theme unfolds in this story, Elizabeth has
been forced through the inability of her husband to take
over management of both the family hotel, a failing busi-
ness, and the inner affairs of the family preper. She is
resented by her husband as a usurper, and unable to love or
respect him, she focuses her interest and love on her son,
in whom she sees the potential for the individual fulfill-
ment that her role as woman and as head of the household had
denied her. Inwardly she was a mass of determination that
violently defied anything that threatened her son; outwardly
she was perfunctory, almost apologetic in his presence.

Consequently Elizabeth is continually afraid that her
life, spent in Opposing both the forces of conventional suc-
cess and her husband with her son as the stake, is indecisive
and meaningless. She can only hope that somehow the boy under-
stands. Finally he announces that he is going away: ”I just
want to go away and look at people and think."17 She is un-
able to reply, but she knows that she has won; "She wanted
to cry out with joy...but the eXpression of joy had become
impossible to her,"18 and the story ends in perfunctory for-
mality, the barriers still solid between them.

In these three stories Anderson sets forth the theme
of the problem of human isolation in the three aspects that

recur in most of the other stories. These three problems,

 

17Winesburg, Ohio, 36. 13121Q.. 37.

112

the inability to communicate one's feeling, one's thought,
and one's love, are at the heart of the problem, and in the
following stories he shows these shortcomings at work in
other situations with other central characters but essenti-
ally as restatements of the same theme. In each of the
characters something deep within him demands expression.
Essentially it is part of him that he wants desperately to
share with others directly, and he is unable to do it, either
through his own inability to break through the shell that
surrounds him or else because society forbids it or distorts
it. In each case this inability makes him turn in upon him-
self, becoming a grotesque, a person deserving of understand-
ing and wanting it desperately, but completely unable to find
it except in occasional flashes, as in the embrace between
Elizabeth and Doctor Reefy in "Death" and in the attempts
made by many of them to seek understanding in George Willard.
However, such moments merely serve to emphasize the intensity
of their isolation as they are startled by a noise or as
George misunderstands or fails to understand and leaves them
behind in frustration.

As George Willard appears and reappears in about half
.of the stories as leading character, as an audience, or as a
casual observer he lends a unity to the collection that makes
it approach the novel form. Much.more important, however, is
his role in permitting full development of Anderson's theme.
In two of the first three stories, ”Hands" and "Mother," he

113

plays the part that has beenascribed to him in more than
half of the following stories. To each of the grotesques
he appears to be what that individual wants him to be. To
his mother he is an extension of herself through which her
dreams may be fulfilled; to Wing Biddlebaum he is the symbol
of the innocent love that had been denied him; to othenahe
becomes, in turn, a symbol of a long-lost son, of father-
confessor, of masculine strength and fertility, of innocent,
undemanding human understanding. Each interprets George as
he wishes, but to each he primarily serves the function of
an ear into which can be poured the inner stirrings of fear,
hope, love, and dreams of which each is made. Because he
is a part of the apparently integrated community in his job
as reporter on the Winesburg Egglg, he represents to each of
them the opportunity to restore communication with the world
from which each feels excluded. These grotesques see in
George the key that will release them from their personal
prisons and enable them to resume normal human forms, either
vicariously, as in the case of his mother and others, or
directly, through understanding, acceptance, and love. Be-
cause George is innocent, unspoiled by the world that has
rejected and isolated them, they see in him their only chance
to return to the fellowship of men.

As a result, Wing Biddlebaum feels confident in his
presence and is willing to walk freely with him through the

town; his mother feels a sudden surge of strength in his

114

(presence; Doctor Percival feels confident enough to reveal
the secret behind his mask of hate--the overwhelming com-
passion that makes him declare that "...everyone in the

world is Christ and they are all crucified;"19 Louise
Trunnion in "Nobody Knows" seeks him out for a moment of

love that manifests itself in sex. In following stories

the role of George Willard parallels these. He is sought

out, he receives confidences, he is receptive and sympathetic,
and the grotesques for the most part go away momentarily satis-
fied, unaware that while they have found temporary release,
they have not found freedom from the confines of their spiri-
tual prisons.

Only in "Queer," the story of Elmer Cowley, does the
grotesque resent the person of George Willard. Just as the
others have seen Willard as the symbol of whatever will free
them from their isolation, Elmer sees George as the mani-
festation of the society that rejects him. In this story
Elmer resents George and yet attempts to establish satis-
factory relations with him. Failing this, he assaults
George, leaving him behind bewildered and half-conscious,
and hOpping a freight, Elmer voices his frustration as he
cries, "I guess I showed him. I ain't so queer. I guess

I showed him I ain't so queer."2O

191bid., 48. 20Ibid., 196.

115

In this story Elmer Cowley points out the difficulty
that the other grotesques thus far have failed to perceive:
George Willard does not understand. All of the others had
seen him as an extension of self that could not fail to
understand and that could ease their passage into the inti-
macies of human life, and each believed that he did somehow
understand, even as he left in sympathy but baffled or, as
in the case of Louise Trunnion, completely misunderstanding.
But Elmer sees him as society, as the symbol of rejection,
and finding himself tongue-tied in George's presence, he
can do nothing else but assault George and then run off,
defiant but defeated. Elmer sees that George as society
does not understand, while the others fail to see that as
son, as lover, as mirrored self, he does not understand
either.

As the grotesques reveal themselves to George, they
do not arouse in him the conventional understanding that
they seek, but without realizing it, each of them is con-
tributing to the growth of a more important kind of under-
standing in him. This kind is based on compassion and on
the sincere desire to understand what these people are try-
ing to tell him, and it does not result from objective
analysis but from intuitive perception of the nature and
worth of the individual. As the stories unfold he is still
too young and inexperienced to grasp much more than that,
but his contacts with the grotesques are drawing him closer

116

to eventual understanding through teaching him the com-
passion and the empathy that will permit him in time to
know and understand others.

In the development of George Willard, Anderson indi-
cates that one can learn to seek out moments of understand-
ing, of acceptance, of communication without the use of words
that can.be twisted, distorted, or misunderstood. Early in
the collection George had completely misinterpreted a lonely
plea, mistaking it for an invitation to a sex adventure;
later, with Kate Swift he almost makes the same mistake,
finally realizing that "I must have missed something. I
have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me;"21
and finally, in "Sophistication" his brief meeting with Helen
White brings him to realize that sex and love are not synony-
mous but that they are often confused. This realization
makes possible for him the eventual achievement of under-
standing. In the process he has learned something of the
nature of the human heart, both of others and of his own,
and he has learned to cpen his and to listen with it rather
than through ears that have become too accustomed to the
sound of the truths become falsehoods all around him.

The sketch ”Departure" is for George anti-climax. In
the microcosm of human nature that is Winesburg he had learned

the fundamental secret of human society that one must reach

211b1d., 298.

117

out and accept and love; he had "...for a moment taken hold
of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in
the modern world possible;"22 and he is ready to take his
place in that world, taking with him something of each of
the grotesques who had sought him out. As long as he remem-
bers that secret he can never become one of them; he knows
that understanding comes only in moments of uncomplicated
acceptance and love.

Willard's two-fold position in the volume goes well
beyond thedbvious factor of providing a unifying figure and
becomes the means through which thematic development becomes
apparent. Human isolation can be overcome and man can take
his place in an understanding relationship with his fellows,
but such understanding can only come about through intuitive
perception of the others as human beings. The normal pro-
cesses of direct communication are useless; what is needed
are increasing and deliberate efforts to attain empathy with
others through compassion, through love, and above all,
through the process of one's own intuition. That this can
be learned Anderson shows through the evolution of Willard's
experience from complete misunderstanding through increasing
awareness and finally into a state where understanding and
fulfillment become possible, at least momentarily. For
this, conditions of receptivity must be right; that is,

221bid., 298.

118

the truths become falsehoods disseminated by society must
have been driven from the consciousness.

In his progress from misunderstanding to intuitive
insight George Willard's development parallels that of
Anderson himself, and in this sense Willard is an auto-
biographical figure. In his own career Anderson had followed
the same path. From misunderstanding and grasping at single
truths and rendering them false as he pursued a business
career, he had become increasingly aware of others and of
the desire to understand them even while his business career
began to go to pieces. Then, finally, as shown in the pages
of Winesburg, thg, he found the secret of intuitive communi-
cation with the inner lives of others. As he has pointed out
in the Memoirs he had begun to write hoping to find understand-
ing; after the false starts that he made in the novels when
he had mistakenly focused on himself and on the world and
had failed to find understanding, he has turned away from
self into others and has begun to find the understanding he
had been seeking.

However, Winesburg, 9h 9 must not be interpreted as
merely an exposition of the theme of human isolation, nor
must it be seen primarily either in the light of a young
man learning about life or as a symbolic representation of
Anderson's acquisition of the powers of intuitive perception.
The book's chief merit is that it is about peOple. ‘Willard's

role is secondary to the people about whom each individual

119

story centers. Whereas the leading character in each of
the novels was clearly Anderson himself, either as dis-
illusioned seeker or as fulfilled hero, in this work his
role is minor, and he has gone beyond himself and into the
lives of others. Each character has elements in common
with the others and with Willard, just as all men share
the common bonds of humanity, but in each case the charac-
ter is primarily an individual, differing from the others
and of course from Anderson himself in all the idiosyncrasies
that make up human character. For the first time Anderson is
attempting to write fiction rather than disguised autobio-
graphy, and the breadth of individuality in the stories shows
the success of the attempt.

Anderson's characterization in the stories is not
fully developed, however. In the Memoirs he points out
that ”...Winesburg, ghgg tried to tell the story of the de-
feated figures of an old American individualistic small town:
life..."23 and in this phrase he points out what he was try-
ing to do and at the same time sheds lights on both charac-
terization and structural technique of the individual stories.
The limitations in Anderson's statement account for the fact
that although each character was an individual,each was
primarily defined by one controlling characteristic that
provided both the key to his character and to the nature of

his grotesqueness.

 

23Memoirs, 290.

120

More importantly, however, from the point of view of
Anderson's narrative technique, each key characteristic was
easily definable in a moment of the author's insight into
the individuality of the person concerned. Thus, in the
stories in which George Willard is absent or makes brief,
unimportant appearances, Anderson utilizes not only theme
and subject matter to tie the stories into the unified col-
lection, but he uses the same technique of a revealing mo-
ment to permit the reader to grasp at the same time both
the nature of the individual's isolation and his controlling
characteristic as an individual, at the same time effectively
strengthening the unified structure of the whole. In "God-
liness" he shows Jesse Bentley as a God-intoxicated man who
sees in himself the reincarnation of an Old Testament parti-
arch; in "The Untold Lie” Ray Pearson is depicted as a man
who has discovered the futility of judging an act absolutely;
"Respectability” pictures a man who seeks love but finds it
perverted into sex; "The Strength of God" shows a minister
who renews his faith through an unconscious distortion of
his own inner drives.

Each of the characters can be revealed in a phrase
because each of them carries within himself the complicating
factor that provides the framework for the story. But this
does not mean that characterization in the stories is slight
or simple; it does mean, however, that the characterizations

are primarily based upon depth rather than breadth, and each

121

is a narrow area deeply explored, with the emphasis placed
upon the uniqueness of that basic trait.

This concept of characterization leads directly into
the narrative technique that Anderson has emplOyed in the
stories. There are no carefully-constructed plots, sequences
of significant incidents, or patterns of rising or falling
action. Rather, the stories are character-plotted, and each
consists of the revelation of the character core that is the
essence of the central figure's being. Outside events in the
stories are normally of little or no importance except as they
provide opportunity for this revelation, and in effect Ander-
son has primarily been providing opportunity for his reader
to peer deeply into a man's soul as he puts his stories to-
gether. In each this is but the work of a moment, sometimes
handled in a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph, but in that
brief moment Anderson has revealed, with his sincere com-
passion, the deepest secret of each character's being, the
fear, the frustration, or the love or h0pe that he kept with-
in himself, often afraid to reveal it.

In combining this method of characterization with an
intuitive approach to its ultimate revelation Anderson has
provided in the stories a series of moments of insight, each
of them designed to provide a brief, intuitive, but true
glimpse of the anguish of the human heart. Although his
interest in psychoanalysis had been increasing during the

Chicago years, nevertheless he does not use the techniques

122

of artificially induced self-revelation nor does he reveal

for the sake of reaching objective conclusions. Rather the
technique that he employs is intuitive perception accomplished
not through analysis but through empathy, and his purpose is
not to diagnose and to cure but simply to understand and to
love. The stories are not literary psychiatrists' couches;
they are vehicles by which Anderson as craftsman can express
the insight into individual aspects of human nature as it has
been revealed to him through the intuitive approach that he

as artist feels is valid in artistic expression.

In attempting to measure the achievement of Winesburg,
thg critics have evolved numerous conflicting theories.
Criticism contemporary with the publication of the work had
seen it as naturalistic or realistic;24 in the thirties it
was called primitivistic;25 and more recent critics have seen
in it an elaborate structure designed "...to replace the myth
of the small town Christian virtues with the myth of the gro-
tesque..."26 by showing ”...the sexual and imaginative frustra-
tions of the townspeople."27 This continued attention to the
volume indicates the respect that critics have for it and
their realization that Anderson has accomplished a substantial
piece of work in writing it, but the resulting contradictions
indicate primarily the difficulty of ascribing satisfactory

24Blankenship, 665.

32 2509car Cargill, Intellectual America (New York. 1948).
3.327 e

25Sehev111, 102. 271bid., 103.

123

categories to or providing acceptable explanations for a
complex literary work. The categories of realism or natural-
ism are unsatisfactory as an examination of Anderson's tech-
nique and theme shows clearly. Anderson is not expounding
the theory of a universe of mechanistic forces operating on
his people as the term naturalism would indicate, but he is
showing the essence of their humanity. Neither does he de-
pend for effect upon the constant and careful accumulation

of sharply drawn detail in the tradition of realism, but
rather he sketches, he implies, he insinuates, and he reveals
insights in order to arrive at delineation of character and
of situation that is inward rather than external. Both cate-
gories are unsatisfactory because the stories cannot be
twisted or distorted to meet the demands even of loose appli-
cation of the terms.

The interpretation of the work as an attempt to con-
struct an elaborate American myth is an unnecessary compli-
cation that never occured to Anderson in any of his published
remarks on the book. Rather, as Anderson conceived and wrote
the book and as the completed work shows, he was not writing
about society in the aggregate, either realistically or in
the symbolic structure of mythology. He was not writing
about society at all; he was writing about pe0ple. Each of
his people is conceived and presented as an individual rather
than as merely another manifestation of society. That he is

part of the social structure is important only insofar as

124

every individual is part of that structure, and Anderson
was interested not merely in treating the individual in
terms of that relationship; he was interested in treating
the individual primarily as human being.

Winesbupg, thg is the book that provides the solid
foundation of Anderson's literary reputation in times of
disfavor as well as of favor, and his accomplishment in
the work is impressive. It is not a book of rebellion as
were his earlier works of fiction; instead, it is an affirma-
tion of Anderson's belief in the durability of the human
spirit and of the compassion that he felt was needed at
the heart of human relations. In it Anderson has examined
the problem of human isolation, not in the hope of curing,
but in the certainty of his belief that understanding of
men is important because man himself is important indi-
vidually as well as collectively. In doing so he points
the way toward further understanding, hoping that barriers
among men can be removed. However, understanding, he points
out, must come first, not only because it may eliminate
barriers, but more importantly because to know other human
beings is to love them, and love is the essence of life.

In the process he examines many specific instances
of human isolation, recognizing diversity in both kind and
degree and showing understanding of the nature of the pro-
blem far greater than that he had shown in the two novels.

This major shift in approach indicates that he was consciously

125

avoiding the mistake of over-simplification as he became
writer rather than propagandist or panacea seeker. His

most important discovery, however, was,his realization

that human isolation stems primarily from entirely human
shortcomings, those inherent in sex, in inarticulateness,

in ”...the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind
of beautiful childlike innocence...,"?8 and even in deliber-
ate cruelty. For its victims he had hope aswell as com-
passion because, however seriously they might be distorted,
nevertheless they were reaching out, aware that others
existed and hoping that somehow they might be able to estab-
lish communication. Occasionally, however, when he perceived
that the new materialism was making inroads among the people,
as in "Godliness" and in ”Queer," and the central figures
were isolated by greed, flashes of the old Anderson shine
through. For these people he had contempt, and compassion
and hope are replaced by irony that rises at times, as in
"Queer," to ludicrousness.

In an examination of Winesburg, thg in the light of
Anderson's previous works a number of revealing factors come
to light. In the first place, he has not shifted abruptly
from the thematic focus of the previous works, but a gradual

shifting of thematic focus has taken place. The theme of

 

28Winesburg, Ohio, 66.

126

human isolation in Winesburg, ghig is a direct and logical
result of the shift that had evidently been taking place

in Anderson's thinking. In both Windy McPhegggp'g Sun and
Marching Mpg Anderson had started with the premise that the
effect of industrialism on the individual was to isolate
him. In the former Sam McPherson's acceptance of the con-
cepts of materialism had completely cut him off from others,
and half of the novel is devoted to his attempts to find his
way back into human society. But his direct efforts are
futile, and his final decision that it can only be done
through love of others is vague and unsatisfactory; his con-
cept of intimate relations with other human beings carries
with it too much of the air of Madison Avenue togetherness,
but in spite of its vagueness, the ending points out the
direction that Anderson will take in his efforts to find ful-
fillment through understanding his fellows.

In Marching Meg Anderson attempts to reduce the vague-
ness of this ending to concrete terms. His villain is still
industrialism and its destructive effects on the human qualie
ties of individuals, but he attempts to break down the barriers
of spiritual isolation among men by forging physical bonds
among them, hoping that as a result the villain will be over-
come and spiritual ties will grow also. Again, however,
Anderson indicates in the end that he knows too little of
the nature of the problem he is dealing with; such an easy
solution, he realizes, is primarily the result of wishful

 

127

thinking and it is no solution at all, but it raises other
problems instead of solving the overall problem. Both of
his early frontal assaults on the problem have proved futile,
and a change of focus rather than problem becomes necessary.

M;grAmerican Chants represents this pause to re-examine
both his own position and the validity of his original thesis.
His own position has changed and he has found himself as
writer; his point of view has been narrowed and deepened;
and his realization grows that the problem of human isolation
is not manifested in social movements but in individual cir-
cumstances in human lives. Combining these three factors
he finds that a new approach is necessary, that individuals
cannot be categorized or manipulated as easily as he had
thought. Using the symbol of the strong, fertile corn that
does not seek to interpret, explain, or exploit its existence
and its relationships but merely accepts them, he shows that
man, too, can only be approached in the same intuitive, com-
passionate, and accepting manner. At this point, although
his basic problem remains the same, his approach to that pro-
blem becomes an effort to understand rather than to generalize
and cure.

Winesburg, ghgg is Anderson's attempt to incorporate
this lesson in human terms. In a much looser form than that
permitted by the conventional novel and yet unified by theme,
by technique, and by the gradual emergence of intuitive under-

standing in George Willard, Anderson has narrowed the range of

128

human isolation from a manifestation of society to a charac-
teristic of individuals. In the process he has probed much
more deeply than he had in the past, and he has found that
dehumanized materialism is only a symptom of a much older

and much more serious human malady. Although he still con-
demns the isolation that results from the worship of things,
he demonstrates many more basic isolating factors in human
life: simple inarticulateness; the shortcomings of words as
media of communication; the fallacies of class and of status;
the misinterpretations which society makes especially in the
meaning behind sexual differences; and the confusion of
spiritual seeking with sexual desire. All these, as he shows
in the collection, can only be understood in individual rather
than societal terms.

These factors, he points out, cannot be overcome by
specific remedies; they can only be approached and penetrated
through intuitive understanding and compassion. That this
technique can be learned he demonstrates in the figure of
George Willard. Anderson has not sought to erect a myth of
the grotesque; he has sought to demonstrate that the gro-
tesque is a human being, an individual, who can be under-
stood if one is willing to make the effort to learn the
technique. The false gods, the isolated thoughts become
truths become falsehoods, cannot be easily overcome; they

can only be overthrown through understanding, through.mutua1

129

seeking, and through intuitive perception of the worth of
each individual.

Thus, Winesbur , Qggg is not an isolated work as some
critics maintain,29 standing apart from Anderson's earlier
work. Although as a work of literary art it is far superior
to them, the thematic relationship, actually an intensifica-
tion, is readily apparent. Equally apparent are stylistic
and structural relationships. The rhetorical awkwardness
that was so apparent in Windy McPhersoan §gg has almost dis-
appeared, but it was becoming less conspioious in Marching
Egg and it received its final blows in Mid-American Chants.
Conversely the eXperimentation with the natural rhythms of
American speech that he had conducted in the previous work
has become his major stylistic characteristic, pointing to-
ward his later mastery of thezeproduction of the oral story-
telling tradition that halts, digresses, becomes seemingly
irrelevant at times and yet proceeds swiftly toward a care-
fully defined climax and swift decline. Conversations have
become almost entirely natural, the flat Midwestern tones
naturally reproduced replacing the earlier imitative and
artificial rhetorical flourishes. Characterization has
deepened in contrast to the earlier surface treatment; and
storytelling technique has become carefully controlled and

orderly when compared to the formlessness of the earlier

29Howe, 91.

130

works. In the book as a whole and in most of the individual
stories there is evidence of a plan. In Winesbugg,‘gggg
Anderson knew where he was going, and he was consciously
aware of the implications and ramifications of his theme.
Each of the stories is a manifestation of that theme, and
through the regular appearance of George Willard, the solu-
tion to the problem of human isolation becomes increasingly
closer as George approaches eventual understanding.

In addition Anderson uses the technique of framing the
collection by using sketches at the beginning and the end
both to document his thesis and to further aid structural
unity. "The Book of the Grotesque" sets up the problem of
human isolation and presents its origins in symbolic terms;
"Departure" shows that these shortcomings, made real in the
stories, are not insurmountable, that there is hope if the
individual seeks out the basis of understanding among men.

With the publication of Winesburg, Ohio Anderson had
achieved full stature as a writer, but it was not a stature
that could remain static. Rather the book marks both the
close of the earliest period in his writing career and the
beginning of the second. It represents the culmination of
his discovery of his own particular talents and his own view
of individual lives, and it points out the directions that
his future works are to take, two directions that are dia-
metrically opposed, one of them looking backward in time
at the American past, and the other forward into the age of

industrialism that had been his former prime interest.

131

In pointing to the past that Anderson will become in-
creasingly concerned with both in later works and in his '
own life, the volume is permeated with an air of nostalgia,
a wished-for return to a state of human society that was
uncomplicated, that was characterized not only as "brutal
ignorance"30 but also and more importantly, as "...a kind
of beautiful childlike innocence‘lthag7 is gone forever.”31
Coupled with this is, of course, the realization that the
past is not perfect, nor does Anderson want it so. He
realizes, as did one of his people, "...the fact that many
people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg."32 However,
in a world less complicated, less dehumanized than the age of
industrialism, understanding can be more easily achieved.
As a whole,the book nostalgically evokes the memory of a
way of life that is gone, and as George Willard looks back
from the train he sees that "...the town of Winesburg had
disappeared, and his life there had become but a background
upon which to paint the dreams of his manhood."33

Man cannot live in the past, Anderson knew, and Wines-
burg and its people could not remain static in twentieth-
century America, but the town's image remained, to grow in
importance in his memory, even as he made plans to "...carry

these same people forward into the new American life, into

30Winesburg, Ohio, 66. 511bid. 321bid., 134.

331bid., 303.

132

the whirl and roar of modern machines."34 But that way were
the frustrations and defeats that he had experienced before,
and the image of Winesburg was to become increasingly real
so that he would in time seek a return in the fact of his
own life as well as in his artistic fancy. However, in
1919. full of the heady stuff of literary success and confi-
dent in his own creative powers, Anderson had no anticipa-
tion of that possibility. Rather he was already at work on
a new novel designed to carry Winesburg and its people into
the new age; he was broadening his personal contacts with
that age; and he was moving confidently into what he felt
was the main current of intellectual and artistic life in
the America of his time.

The Chicago Liberation had served its purpose and al-
most run its course; he had a solid literary achievement be-
hind him; and he felt that he could break ties with adver-
tising and move into full realization of the literary success
and personal fulfillment that he felt he had earned. He had
served his literary apprenticeship, achieved master's status
in his craft, and laid out the direction of his future works,
all of them designed to further understanding of the phenome-
non of the American experience. Winesburg, ghig had been a

beginning for him, an exercise in understanding that would

 

34Memoirs, 290.

133

permit him to move forward, examining larger areas of the
American experience, and eventually achieve the understand-
ing that the fictionalized versions of himself in the novels
had sought. But these hopes were just that and no more.

He had yet to understand the peculiar nature of his own
literary gift in spite of his success in Winesburg,‘ghig,
and he still did not realize the enormity and complexity of
the experience that he was trying to assimilate, understand,

and define.

CHAPTER V
THE LARGER VIEW: SOCIAL ANALYSIS AND DESPAIR

In spite of Sherwood Anderson's realization that in
Winesburg, th9 he had accomplished a substantial piece of
literary work, he was unhappy and dissatisfied even before
it was published. Part of this frame of mind stemmed from
his dislike of his advertising work and his disenchantment
with the direction that the Chicago Renaissance had taken,
but even more of it came from his realization that the
Winesburg, ghig collection was not an accomplishment in it-
self as much as it was a beginning of the work that was yet
ahead of him. All of these points of view were expressed
in letters written prior to the publication of Winesburg,
thg, even while he was working on Eggg‘flhitg, the novel
that was to take the people of Winesburg forward in time
into the new industrial age. The old restlessness result-
ing from dissatisfaction had returned, almost as intensely
as it had struck him in Elyria, and he was ready and eager
for changes both in the direction of his personal life and
in his chosen work.

In spite of his easy and cynical return to advertis-
ing, he despised it and wanted to break away. To Trigant

Burrow, he wrote ”...it seems to me that I am now ripe to

134

135

do something, and I hate to see the years and the days go
by in the writing of advertisements for somebody's canned
tomatoes..."1 Instead of devoting his time to trivialities
he wanted "...to go up and down the great valley‘ZEhe area
between the mountain§7 here seeing the towns and the people
and writing of the [fi;7as I do not believe they have been
written of."2 Nevertheless, although, as he wrote, "...I
am willing to live in the very simplest way to accomplish
what I want, ...I do need some assured income. I have three
children who have to be supported."3 People were willing to
pay him for written nonsense rather than what he believed,
and he had very little choice. A short stint as a movie
publicity man in New York disgusted him even more, and it
seemed to him at the time that much as he hated it, he was
doomed to the advertising business.

Chicago itself was even more disgusting to him then.
It was "...simply formless. You know what that means--3azz
bands; weariness; dreary stretches of dull, middle-class
houses;‘[?§7umb, badly organized labor; rattling, stinking
streetcars; utter shiftlessness.”4 All this he could ig-

nore if he were permitted to do his work in the way he felt

 

lSherwood Anderson, Letters 91_Sherwood Anderson,
Howard Mumford Jones and Walter P. Rideout, Eds., (Boston,
1953 . 45.

2Ibid. 3Ibid. 4Ibid., 30.

136

it should be done, but even the literary movement that had
freed his talents had degenerated: "The Little Review got
too dreadfully inartistic and bad. I can't stand appearing
there any more, and there is no place else to appear. There
has never been a time in America when the literary artist
was so completely stranded high and dry."5

Nevertheless, out of this seeming indecision and con-
fusion Anderson was slowly but surely evolving a sense of
direction both for his own life and for his work in the
period following the publication of Winesburg, Ohio, and so
tightly did the two become fused in his mind that he laid
out the paths of both concurrently. To Van Wyck Brooks, a
newly acquired friend, he showed this unconscious fusion
clearly.

One has to realize that, although there is truth
in the Winesburg things, there is another big story
to be done. We are no longer the old America.

Those are tales of farming people. We've got a new
people now. We are a growing, shifting, changing
thing. Our life in our factory towns intensifies.
It becomes at the same time more ugly and more in-
tense.

God damn it, Brooks, I wish my books would sell
for one reason. I want to quit working for a living
and go wander for five years in our towns. I want
to be a factory hand again and wander from place to
place. I want my frame to unbend from t e desk and
to go back and listen to this new thing.

At this stage Anderson well knew that if he was to con-

tinue his self-appointed task of trying to understand the

51bid., 44. 61bid., 31.

1!-

137

American Midwestern experience as he had known it, he had

to make a break once more, just as he had when he left
Elyria, but now, as then, it was a difficult preposition.
During these few years between early 1918 and the publica-
tion of Egg; White in 1920, he spent as much.time as he
possibly could away from Chicago, from advertising, and in-
cidentally, away from his second wife, Tennessee Mitchell,
who was still a sincere believer in the Chicago Liberation
movement which he was beginning to realize he had outgrown.
2223 White was started in New York during his abortive press-
agent eXperience, and most of the first draft was written
there, evidently under the same conditions of pretended
attention to business affairs that he had maintained in Elyria
and in the Chicago advertising agencies. During this time,
too, he was becoming more widely acquainted in New York,
meeting through Waldo Frank.2hg.§gzgn Arts circle, including
Van Wyck Brooks, with whom Anderson found a common absorbing
interest in the meaning of the American eXperience. In spite
cf their different backgrounds and educational levels, the
two became close friends, and Anderson returned to Chicago
reluctantly even though he couldn't stand the dishonesty

that he found inherent in press-agentry. Nevertheless, the
influence of Brooks remained strong, partially accounting

for his coming shift to the analysis of American society

that was to find eXpression in his novels of the next few

years.

138

In Chicago, Poor White was temporarily abandoned; it

 

 

was "...about laid by, as we out here say of the corn crop
in early October. It is in shocks...The husking is yet to
do,"7 and he worked sporadically at other things while he
sought for a means of escape from Chicago. In January of
1920 he became ill with influenza, and seeking an inexpen-
sive, warm climate in which to recover he want to Mobile,
Alabama, where he discovered the leisurely sort of life
that he thought had died with the coming of industrialism.
Here he finished Poor White, returning to Chicago in the
spring with some measure of confidence returning together
with his health and with the "husking” of the manuscript.
Combined with this sense of satisfaction, too, Anderson shows
an increasing awareness of his relationship to the Midwest
that he had discovered in writing Winesburg, thg. To
Brooks he wrote:
Back here I almost feel able to say I don't

care if I never travel again. The place between

mountain and mountain I call Mid-America is gy

land. Good or bad, it s all I ll ever have.

Although the first part of his statment may have been
sincere at the moment, nevertheless his restlessness contin-
ued, especially because of his strong attraction toward the

literary circles of the East and his new interest in the

South. The latter part of the statement is, however,

 

7Ibid., 43. 81bid.

139

indication of his continued intuition that he both could
and would unlock the secret of the uniquely American Mid—
west of his youth.

£29; Whitgg is the first product of his efforts to go
beyond the limitations inherent in the Winesburg, Ohio ap-
proach and to build on the lessons he had learned in writing
it and at the same time carry his people forward into the new
age of industrialism. In this respect it is a continuation
of the story of Winesburg, in which individual lives become
lost in the face of the gigantic industrial forces let loose
on the Midwestern countryside. As Anderson remarked in the
introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel, it
was in that sense an autobiography of a town during its transi-
tion from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The people
of the town gave it its life, but the unfeeling forces of in-
dustrialism gave it its direction.10

Such a statement, however, must not be taken too liter-
ally because Anderson had learned in preparing for and writing
Winesburg,‘thg that he could not ignore the individual, and
the story is in fact not the biography of a town but the bio-
graphy of peOple in the town whose lives have been warped by
industrialism and its concomitant greed. In writing Winesburg,

gsherwood Anderson, Poor White (New York, 1920).

10Sherwood Anderson, Introduction to Poor White (New
York, NODO)’ 1X. '

140

ghég he had focused on individual lives, providing as a by-
product an intimate and detailed picture of American village
life in the late nineteenth century; in'gggg'flhitg he was to
do the same thing in the tighter form of the conventional
novel, focusing on fewer characters in more detail, but at
the same time depicting what has happened to the town and its
people during the period of change.

In seeking to go back in time to identify the origins
of the American Midwestern experience as clearly as possible
Anderson draws heavily on the work of another Midwesterner,
Mark Twain, for whom he had a deep, intuitive sympathy, see-
ing him as a man who ”...hears the whispering of the gods...
Zbecaus§7 he was the half-savage, tender, godéworshiping, be-
lieving boy. He had proud, conscious innocence."11 222;,
White begins in Mark Twain's Mississippi River Valley, the
microcosm of what he had characterized in Winesburg, thgyas
the age ”...of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also
a kind of beautiful childlike innocence..."12 Out of this
environment that produced Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the
symbol of that age of innocence, Anderson has produced Hugh
McVey, the protagonist of Egggflflhitg, who grows up in the
image of Abraham Lincoln, to emerge, like Lincoln, an un-

witting symbol of a new age.

11Letters, 33. 12Winesburg. 0hi2. 55-

141

McVey's father, like Huckleberry's, is a drunkard, a
victim of failure in an age increasing conscious of success,
and in McVey's early years in Mudcat Landing, Missouri, Ander-
son shows the first evidences of the loss of childhood inno-
cence and the intensification of brutal ignorance. This is
the point where Winesburg, thg leaves off; from here Ander-
son moves McVey rapidly and inevitably into the new era.

The coming of the railroad is the immediate symbol of
the new age as well as the means whereby McVey enters it,
but more important is the philosophy he learns through the
wife of the stationmaster who employs him. Just as Huck Finn
had been forced to become civilized by the Widow Douglas,
Hugh is also, but whereas Huck rebels, Hugh is unable to,
and he absorbs and accepts her New England philosophy that
"'It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless.”13 He is deter-
mined to succeed, to amount to something, to get ahead in
the world.

Here Anderson touches upon a phenomenon noted by other
Midwestern novelists: the impact on the area of the New
England puritan concept that work and close attention to
business affairs were the only acceptable Christian activi-
ties for a man. Louis Bromfield calls this influence the

concept of the peddler,14 a pragmatic materialistic philosophy

 

13Poor White, 12.
14Louis Bromfield, The Farm (New York, 1933). 68.

142

that had much to do with the direction of thinking and action
in the Midwest after the frontier had passed. Anderson,
growing up as he did on the western edge of the Firelands
Area of Connecticut's Western Reserve, had had the oppor-
tunity not only to learn the philosOphy but to experience it
in action.

In spite of his proclivity to dream, McVey perseveres,
becomes a skilled telegrapher, and in time comes to Bidwell,
Ohio, a town that is in effect Winesburg as it was when
George Willard left it. Anderson sketches the spirit of
the town, the time, and the area as it was:

In all the towns of mid-western America it was
a time of waiting. The country having been cleared
and the Indians driven away..., the Civil War hav-
ing been fought and won, and there being no great
national problems that touched closely upon their
lives, the minds of men were turned in upon them-
selves...

In all the great Mississippi Valley each town
came to have a character of its own...a kind of
invisible roof beneath which every one lifed Spread
itself over each town. Beneath the roof boys and
girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and
formed friendships with their fellows, were intro-
duced into the mysteries of love, married, and be-
came the fathers and mothers of children, grew
old, sickened, and died.

Within this invisible circle and under the great
roof every one knew his neighbor and was known to
him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confus-
ing roar of machinery and of new projects afoot.
For the moment mankind seemed about to take time
to try to understand itself.15

15Poor White, 46-47.

143

Bidwell was, then, Winesburg as George Willard had
seen it from the train, poised and waiting on the verge of
entering into the new age. It was still a town of indivi-
duals and of groups, of craftsmen and of laborers, but a
wise man of the town saw the change coming: "'Well, there's
going to be a new war here...It won't be like the Civil War,
Just shooting off guns and killing people's bodies. At
first it's going to be a war between individuals to see to
what class a man must belong; then it is going to be a long,
silent war between classes, between those who have and those
who can't get. It'll be the worst war of all.”16

It is this war that Hugh McVey, the unconscious in-
strument of the age, is to bring about. He becomes an in-
ventor, his inventions are taken up by young men of affairs
in the town, and in time Bidwell becomes an industrial
center. Again Anderson attempts to recapture the atmosphere
that made this transformationemerge from idealistic dream to
realistic and materialistic fact:

New talk ran through the town. A.new force that

was being born into American life and into life

everywhere all over the world was feeding on the

old dying individualistic life...It was meant to

.seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to

walk under seas and fly through the air...17

As the new industrialism, sparked by the inventive
genius of HugthcVey, came into being in the town the re-

alities of greed, corruption, and cruelty replaced these

 

16Ibid., 51. l71bid., 62.

144

ideals. McVey, the innocent creature of circumstance, re-
beled, but it was too late, and the war prophesied by the
old man came true: oppression and strikes became the fruit
that the town harvested instead of its earlier agricultural
products, and McVey, like the earlier Anderson, could only
turn his back on the industrial giant and seek meaning else-
where.

This skeletal outline of the book's narrative struc-
ture indicates that Anderson has written the biography of a
town, and in doing so he was drawn heavily on the experience
that went into both Windy McPherson's Son and Marching Men.
But, although Anderson's earlier protest against industrial-
ism is still very much in evidence, this is not a sociologi-
cal document nor is it mere protest. Rather, Anderson's con-
cern here is with the impact of the new industrialism on the
individual and the ensuing warping of character that produces
technological grotesques more horrible than those he had de-
picted in Winesburg, Ohio. The work becomes, then, much
more than the biography of a town; it becomes the vehicle
for moving the people of Winesburg into an age that produces
a more rigid isolation, a more horrible individualism, and a
more demanding conformity than anything they had ever known
before.

This, then, becomes the major theme of the book: the
study of the impact of industrialism upon the human person-

ality. The central figure, Hugh McVey,shows this impact

1A5

most clearly and definitively, but its ramifications are
evident throughout the book on every level of society rang-
ing from the country squire turned entrepeneur to the farm
boy turned millhand. The effects of industrialism are

shown to be an intensified isolation, a confused and often v/
meaningless sense of values, and an economic inhumaneness
more pronounced and more deliberate in the economic jungle
than it had ever been before.

In delineating Hugh McVey as the central character
Anderson has not merely given his novel focus; rather, he
has attempted to portray a character that would incorporate
within himself the essence of the American myth as it has i
been taken over by industrialism. As executed, McVey is
another Edison, a man capable of seeing through to the heart
of a practical problem and taking practical steps to solve
it, in the process making human life a bit easier and more
convenient to live. However, Anderson embodies in the charac-
ter of this Edison-like figure an insight and a sense of human
worth that a practical man rarely has time for, and the re-
sulting combination produces a figure who occupies a posi-
tion in the industrial realm parallel to that of Abraham
Lincoln in the political realm.

The resemblance of Hugh McVey to Lincoln is not merely
accident, however, rather, Anderson has constructed it care-
fully, utilizing physical awkwardness, a dreamy nature, and

a strain of practicality as well as a deep sense of compassion

146

to produce a man capable of embodying the various American
myths and giving them focus, as had Lincoln.

Anderson has done this because he has seen the paral-
lel between the struggle of which Lincoln became the focal
point and that which he intends to symbolize by McVey. The
Lincolnian struggle was an effort to attain political free-
dom that in time, it was hoped, would result in spiritual
freedom and the ultimate ennobling of man, and this struggle
Anderson sees as a forerunner of the fight for economic free-
dom that he hoped would ultimately have the same end.

Like Lincoln, McVey's origins are humble, obscure,
and firmly rooted in the frontier traditions of freedom and
individualism. At the same time-each feels a compassion for
his fellow man that transcends the ruggedness of frontier
individualism and makes him, in effect, his brother's keeper
rather than his competitor. Each man has a personality made
up of a combination of dreamy idealism and practical dedica-
tion, the latter both threatened and modified by the former
so that a stormy balance is struck. Taciturn and unpreten-
tious, each has pursued a course of meeting the problem of
liberation head on, seeking an idealistic solution in a
practical, direct way, and each sees the goal of physical
liberation within reach and the final spiritualliberation
on the horizon.

In carrying on the struggle, however, each has become

an unwitting tool both of men whose motives are less noble

k

147

than their own and, more importantly, of forces of their
respective ages. Although each has unleashed the forces,
he can no longer control or direct them to desirable ends,
and neither physical nor spiritual liberation materializes.
Lincoln's death left the forces unleashed, resulting in the
chaos of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, but Anderson
lets McVey live, and his final realization of what he and
industrialism had done and his resolution to find a cure
for the resulting evils through an increased awareness of
human values leave hope for the future.

The parallel between Lincoln and McVey is carried
through in the area of human relations. Lincoln is the
classic isolated figure in American history. Tall, silent,
and mysterious, he has given rise to an entire body of Ameri-
can folklore that shows him constantly reaching out to
others, pardoning sleeping sentries and bewildered desert-
ers, taking time to write letters of condolence to poor
widows, attempting to establish a common ground with an
unsympathetic wife; and in McVey Anderson portrays the same
characteristics in essence if not in fact. Again, Lincoln's
death left his isolation unresolved so that myth-makers may
make of it what they will. But McVey lives, and in the
final pages of the book Anderson indicates that McVey's
reaching out is beginning to show results, that the first,
most intimate gap has been bridged.

148

Anderson provides no blueprint for carrying this out,
however. His means had already been proposed in Winesburg,
thg: to ignore the conventional and superficial interpre-
tations of human acts and relationships and to probe intui-
tively and compassionately beneath them for common under-
standing as man and man rather than man and woman, doctor
and patient, teacher and pupil, or any of the other conven-
tional dichotomies.

The impact of industrialism upon Hugh has been to de-
lude him into confusing means with ends and to make of him
a well-paid but unthinking servant. He has been saved, how-
ever, by his innate sense of honesty that made him revolt
at the obvious theft of another's patents and by the influ-
ence of his wife, the daughter of the richest man in Bidwell.
Prior to her marriage she had maintained an active rebellion
against the forces of convention that attempted to make her
a grotesque, and she maintains that attitude toward indust-
rialism and materialism. She represents in the novel the
free spirit who refuses to let herself become imprisoned and
distorted by outside pressures of any kind, and in spite of
the misunderstandings she encounters she maintains her per-
sonal integrity and tries to eXpand it through intimacy with
others. It is this lesson that McVey eventually learns from
her as he begins his search for personal fulfillment through
understanding and loving others rather than through the in-

vention and accumulation of things.

149

On lower levels the impact of industrialism is both
immediate and brutal. In some of the best and most inti-
mate sections of the book, strongly reminiscent of the
moments of insight in Winesburg, thg, Anderson shows the
farmhand who comes to the factory to save himself from the
isolated drudgery of the farm, only to find a more intense
isolation and more demanding and degrading job in the shape;
he portrays the bewilderment of the little people of the town,
especially of Joe wainsworth, the harness-maker, whose craft
has been superseded by the machines;18 he shows the degenera-
tion of human values into materialistic values as the towns-
people seek fulfillment in selling out to the new age.

The struggle in the novel, then, is actually that of
attempting to find and retain human values in the face of a
defiant, whistling, screaching industrialism, just as it had V”
been in Anderson's earlier novels. But Egg; White is a much
more analytical approach to the same problem. Industrialism
itself is no longer the villain, the source of all human
spiritual ills, as the earlier novels maintains. Rather, it
merely provides the Opportunity for an intensification of the
same inhumanity, the same individualism run wild, that had
distorted the people of Winesburg and all people since men
began to live in groups and to adopt standards of appearance

rather than intrinsic value as measures of worth.

 

18This, perhaps, indicates an increasing understand-
ing of the quandary his father had been in, and it lays the
groundwork for an important theme in his next period.

 

 

 

150

Industrialism is potentially a source of much good, as
Anderson points out; it becomes evil when it is controlled
by materialistic values rather than human values. In the
long range view, however, he has hope that man may acquire
the proper sense of values, as Hugh McVey indicates, but
in the meanwhile life for the little people is destined to
be a series of private, personal tragedies of farmhands,
harness makers, and others who have found their lot to be
exploitative.

In the novel Anderson has furthered his attempt to
understand the Midwestern experience of his time by fusing
the first major theme with which he dealt, the impact of
industrialism on the individual, with the second, the pro-
blem of human isolation. Both appeared in Windy McPherson'g
San, but they were parallel stories because Anderson's anger
at materialism prevented him from seeing that the former is
merely a manifestation of the latter, and both appeared but
remained unjoined because Anderson was misled by his search
for a cure. Winesburg,‘ghig, following tentative explora-
tions in.Mig-American Chants, brought him to the realization
that human isolation resulted from the confusion of appear-
ance with reality, and here in 229; Whit; he has finally »/
learned that the giant industrialism is neuter, that it
takes on meaning only from the human elements that control
it; thus the problem resolves itself to the ultimate one of
attaining the intuitive perception of human worth that he

151

had sought among the people of Winesburg and placing that
value rather than the superficial value of appearance in
the controlling position in the new age. Hugh McVey, in
the end, is marking out this path; as Anderson comments,
"The poor white...who had forced himself in advance of his
fellows along the road of mechanical development, was still
in advance of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns. The
struggle he was making was the struggle his fellows of an-
other generation would...have to make."19 This is the pro-
blem that Anderson is to return to, after a good deal of
doubting, searching, and questioning at the end of his career.
As a novel, Eggr‘flhitg is a complex and important work,
chronicling as it does the rapid transition of the American
town from an agricultural to an industrial economy, but it
is not a perfect work. Problems of structure remain to mar
it as they had the earlier novels, although the artificiality
of style, diction, and conversation of the earlier novels has
been replaced by the natural idioms and style of 312232235,
Qgig. Digressions that seem to belong in the shorter pieces
become barriers that prevent the easy flow of narrative in
the novel form as in the long section devoted to Clara Butter-
worth. More important than this, however, is the fact that
Anderson had not yet learned to end a novel. Indecision is

acceptable at the end of one of his sketches or stories; it

19Poor White, 304.

 

 

152

is accepted as part of life rather than life itself, but
in a novel the same sort of ending results in dissatis-
faction.

These shortcomings are strengths in the shorter
forms when combined with Anderson's ability to penetrate
to the essence of character; in the novels they tend to
point out Anderson's major ability as a writer: his propen-
sity and ability to tell only part of a larger story. In
the short forms, the reader feels, therefore, that he has
been permitted a glimpse beneath the mysterious surface of
life; in the novels he has had more than a glimpse but he
is still no closer to the ultimate meaning of life than he
had been before. The result of such indecisiveness is
further documentation of the thesis that consciously or un-
consciously, Anderson is making each of his works a part of
the panorama of Midwestern experience that all of them com-
bine to make. Nevertheless, the individual novels leave the
reader unsatisfied. In 2222 White the individual sketches
of the little people of the town remain vivid, but the de-
mands of the novel form limit his ability by forcing him to
straight exposition, and his particular gifts suffer as a
result.

On the whole, however, figgg;fihitg is a major achieve-
ment. Marking as it does Anderson's first attempt to fuse
and interpret the apparently diverse themes with which he

had been concerned, it is the first novels of his artistic

153

maturity, and withlgit Brandon it remains one of his best.
Furthermore it is clear indication that Anderson's concern
is not with the naturalistic or the realistic in human life
and affairs but with the humanistic values that make life
livable.

‘ngr‘flhitg ends on a note of optimism that Anderson
was finding difficult to maintain in his personal affairs.
In spite of a favorable critical reception that added to
his growing reputation as a writer, it added little to his
financial standing, and the future seemed to be a long,
bleak succession of advertising agencies. He worked sporad-
ically at free verse to be incorporated in a volume called
A New Testament; he worked on a never-completed novel called
thg Pagans, and he worked on short stories in the Winesburg,
thg manner, but the demands of the advertising agency made
him grim, and he felt that his escapes from it could be
nothing more than momentary releases.

At the same time he was bitter about both the general

reception of Winesburg, Ohio and the difficulty he was hav-

 

ing placing some of his work. Not only had he received a
substantial amount of poison pen letters accusing him of
writing filth, but even some of his friends missed his point.
To Van Wyck Brooks he write, "It did hurt...when I found you

also taking Winesburg...as a sex book. It got under my hide

 

a bit. I'm usually thick-skinned."2O In the Memoirs he

__

20Letters, 59.

154

recalls that "At the time however I was half ill for months.
'I will write no more,’ I told myself, and sometimes when I
had received...perhaps a half dozen abusive letters I went
and got drunk. 'If I am so filthy I shall be filthy,' I
told myself."21

Not only were his published works not selling well,22
but he was having trouble placing shorterlieces, and he had
little hope that he would ever be able to earn a living writ-
ing. "N23 Republic, Nation, Freeman," he exploded, "None of
them give a damn for literature really. They seem to feel
that creative writing has nothing to do with revolution."23
They had just in turn rejected a short sketch, "The Man in
the Brown Coat," which subsequently appeared in The Little
Review.

Meanwhile, sick and disgusted, he continued to work,
abandoning Ohio Pagans in favor of sustained work on short
stories, which he began to see as a collection in a form
much looser than the Winesburg stories but nevertheless a
unified and organic whole. 2393 m came out, was well
received, but did not sell. At this point he wrote the
long tale "Out of Nowhere into Nothing" for the collection

that he started to call The Triumph g; the Egg. Early in

 

21Memoirs, 297.

22Winesburg, Ohio, for example, sold less than five
thousand copies in two years.

23Letters, 59.

155

1921 he completed the collection and was casting about at
odds with himself, even quarreling with Waldo Frank, when
suddenly Paul Rosenfeld offered to pay passage to Europe
for both him and Tennessee. He accepted immediately, and
in May they sailed for France.

In spite of the fact that the exodus of the eXpatriates
was on, Anderson was not running from America; unlike the
others of the times he had no intention of remaining in /

Europe. Rather, as he indicates in.A Stopy Teller's Story,24

 

he was eager to drink in all the culture and sense of time
and beauty that his narrow life had denied him, but he was"
not critical of America for the cultural shortcomings that
it possessed. Rather he believed that America, like him,
had much to learn, and he felt they would learn together,.
he directly and America vicariously. At the same time, '
France, he felt, was old, but America was young and adapt-
able, and in time its culture would surpass that of France.
Generally his trip was enjoyable and broadening. He met
Gertrude Stein for the first time; he made nany literary
acquaintances; and he arranged for EurOpean publication of
his earlier books.

In view of an abrupt change in his handling of sex

in works immediately following the trip, it may be that

 

24Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller'g Story (New
York, 1924), 398-410.

 

156

there is a direct relationship between the two, and there
is some evidence to support the hypothesis. In the earlier
works, from 113511 McPherson'g §_g_n_ to £923 _W_h_i_t_§, the sex
act is either a brutal hunger, as between customer and
prostitute, or a tawdry, half-shameful, furtive, and mutu-
ally unsatisfactory relationship between husband and wife.
In works following this trip, starting with £43511 Marria es,
Anderson tries to bring sex out into the cpen so that it
may be seen as the healthy and good thing that he maintains
it is. To attribute this shift to three months in Eurcpe
is to oversimplify to a dangerous degree, but as James
Schevill points out, in the notebook that Anderson kept
during the trip appear statements admiring the free accep-
tance of the human body and sexual love among the French.
Upon his return his fortunes began to change. In
October of 1921 he was awarded the pig; Prize of two thou-
sand dollars for a promising young writer. Anderson, who
was forty-five, accepted gratefully, and the ensuing publi-
city, aided by favorable cements by W. L. George and Sin-
clair Lewis, tended to increase the demands for his earlier
books. When 1h; Triumph 9; 3.1.1.9. Egg appeared later that
fall, it was well received and sold well, and Anderson saw
the chance to free himself from advertising, which to him
was dishonesty; Chicago, in which he felt that both the
Liberation and its ideas were dead; and the marriage with

Tennessee which had been unsatisfactory for him for some

157

time. Tennessee, like Chicago, symbolized a break with con-
vention and with the past, and both of them had served their
purpose. Now he felt that he had gone beyond them, and with
his increasing sense of social and literary responsibility
he had no more patience with either.

The most important event after his return was, of
course, the publication of Eh; Triumph 9_f_ 2h: 3‘55. As if
in realization of the fact that he could very often most
nearly approach the essence of human existence in the short
story form, he made very few pre or post publication com-
ments about what he was trying or had tried to do. Instinc-
tively he seemed to realize that it would stand on its own
literary merits and that his own defense of it would be un-
necessary, a supposition that, if made, was entirely correct.
The volume contains some of the stories that have been con-
sistently pointed out in anthologies as models of the Ameri-
can short story.

Unlike his previous collection, Winesbur , thg, _i'_h_9_
Trit_1_m2h 9; _t_h_e m does not have the unifying factors of
setting, character, time, and structure that have made
Winesburg approach the novel in form. It does, however,
have a unifying theme that serves the prime purpose of tying
the stories together so that the work becomes more than a
general collection and approaches a consistent statement of
Anderson's view of the ultimate end of the individual human
life. In the sketches devoted to the little people caught

158

pp in the onslaught of industrialism in _P_o_o_1_~ M Anderson
had pointed out that their lot was hopeless, that only in
the larger sense could man regain control of his destiny

by regaining control of the industrial giant; here in _Thg
Triumph g; the Egg he ignores the larger view, focuses his
attention upon the individual lives of the same little
people he had seen in Bidwell, in Winesburg, and in Chicago,
and points out that for them there is no hope nor is there
any promise of any. As the book continues from story to
story, the intensity of the premise accumulates until finally
at the end of the volume Anderson's compassion for his people
culminates in despair over the tragedy inherent in their
lives. Prior to this, even though the context of each
earlier work contained much that was tragic, he ended each
on a note that indicated the chance that personal salvation,
however unlikely, nevertheless was at least possible forhis
people. In this work that possibility no longer exists.

An important difference between the individual trage-
dies of 239; lhi__t_e_ and of this collection immediately becomes
apparent, however, In 232;: _Wh_i_t_e_ these tragedies were in-
duced by the economic framework of society; here inghg
Triumph _o_f_ .t_h_e_ Egg they result from the same human short-
comings that he had pointed out in Winesbur , 9_1_i_il._o_, inten-
sified, however, by the social structure. As a result he
sees man imprisoned by forces primarily of his own making,

either in the'personal or the collective sense, and the

159

individual is able to do no more than glimpse the bright
promise of personal fulfillment somewhere outside the iron
bars of his own personal cage.

In order to give a semblance of structural unity to
the volume Anderson begins and ends with brief prose-poems,
the first of which is designed to set forth the theme of the
book, and the second of which concludes the theme by placing
the responsibility for the lack of human fulfillment squarely
on man himself. In the former, ”The Dumb Man” the direction
of the stories is laid out: in the midst of an incident
that is apparently meaningless Anderson points out it is
possible for one to determine the secrets of life, death,
and love, and hence know both himself and others, but that
the insight gained can never be given to others. "I have
a wonderful story to tell but know no way of telling it,"25
he laments in conclusion.

As in Winesbur , 9_h_i_9_ Anderson is primarily concerned
with the problem of human isolation in each of the following
stories, but the last line of ”The Dumb Man" indicates the
seriousness of the problem as he now sees it. A sense of
inadequacy, frustration, and despair emanates from those
lines and finds its way into the human lives and relation-
ships that he probes for understanding in the stories. As

 

) ZiSherwood Anderson, The Triumph 21. the Egg (New York,
1921 , .

160

he intuitively grasps the essence of each life he also makes
apparent the inherent tragedy of personal and human.inade-
quasy in each.

In the first of the stories, ”I Want to Know'Why,”
Anderson returns to the rural Midwest and to a boy's initi-
ation to the realities of life to start off the collection
on a note of frustrated bewilderment. Long considered an
example of the art of the short story at its best and widely
anthologized, it is considered a classic example of the
”adolescent initiation” theme. However, this interpreta-
tion is only possible when the work is examined alone; when
treated in the context of Anderson's work as a whole and
especially in-its position in this volume as the opening
story following such a declaration of frustration and despair,
it takes on a deeper, more complex, and more significant mean-
ing. In spite of its adolescent atmosphere Anderson uses the
story as a vehicle for expressing what is to him the most
important of adult tragedies: the inability to understand
the complexity of values and emotions that not only make up
society but, more importantly, that make up each of the indi-
viduals of which society is composed. The adolescent narra-
tor is convenient, perhaps even necessary, because he is un-
inhibited enough to give voice to frustrations that an adult
would be expected to accept.

The story tells of a Midwestern youth who, fond of
race horses almost to the point of obsession, follows the

0‘

 

 

161

races to a meet at Saratoga. In the course of the story
Anderson examines values of society and of individuals
through the eyes of the boy, noting the contradictions and
the illogicality inherent in them, and at the end the boy
protests at his inability to understand than. The first
of these contradictions is on a comparatively simple note:
a white man will tell on a bad or mischievous kid; a negro
man won't. The boy makes no attempt to explain the contrast,
but he muses on it, while Anderson implies that the white
men, having given their alliegance to a standard of values
outside themselves, have lost the ability to understand
others. The negroes, on the other hand, have not had to
make that concession, and their understanding remains inti-
mate, uncomplicated, and personal. This is a theme to which
Anderson returns later, examining it more closely in‘Qggk
Lagghter.

There are other contradictions apparent to the boy:
the good, generous man who is condemned because he is a
gambler; the men who fail to see the beauty of a race horse
but see him only as a vehicle for gambling. (The negroes,
incidentally, are capable of seeing and appreciating that
beauty, but few adult whites are.) The most important con-
tradiction, however, is that which gives rise to the plain-
tive title: the trainer of a beautiful, emotbly-cordmated‘
horse who can leave the horse and visit a prostitute who,

although she is superficially pleasing, is ”not clean like

 

I?

 

162

...[the horsg7, but with a hard, ugly mouth."25 There lies
the real tragedy of human life: that a man who has seen
real beauty can fail to recognize it and turn instead to

a cheap substitute. It is the basic confusion of values
that underlies all the rest, and the boy, like Anderson, is
unable to explain it.

Here Anderson is not talking about adolescent initi-
ation to life; he is talking about the same confusion of
values that had misled Sam McPherson and Hugh.McVey. In
this story, however, Anderson points out that the problem
is too deeply rooted in individual as well as societal
standards to be expelled either by personal rebellion or re-
Jection or by sudden altruism. It is tragic because man is
unable to distinguish between the beautiful and the cheap or
the real and the make-believe.

Brooks and warren comment adversely on the lapses in
style that permit occasional glimpses of the adult narrator
who has introded on the boy's story,27 but Anderson has be-
come craftsman enough by this time so that it is safe to
assume that these lapses are not accidental. Rather, they
permit the reader to see the adult implications of the theme.
Anderson had adopted a Swift-like mask of youth, but again
like Swift he wants to run no risk of misinterpretation,

 

261bid., 18.

27Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, Under-
standing Fiction (New York, 1943). 349. "

163

and so the mask is permitted to slip. The boy is bitter
at the dichotomy of values that has destroyed his world.
The adult is even more bitter because he is helpless in

the face of it.

In the second story, ”Seeds,” Anderson provides an
adult commentary on the same human phenomenon. An experi-
mental piece containing an opening dialogue between two
symbolic figures and a concluding illustrating sketch, the
story first contrasts the role of the artist with the role
of the psychoanalyst. Intuition is the key to understanding
the human heart, he concludes; ”'It is given to no man to
venture far along the road of lives...Fool--do you expect
love to be understood?”28 he asks. Only the artist, with
compassion and understanding, can penetrate the ”...old
thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men”29 that are chok-
ing human life and preventing its fulfillment. The conclud-
ing sketch, the tragedy of a young woman who confuses love
with sex, bears him out. we know that love will save us,
he concludes, but we are unable to recognize or find it.

"The Egg,” the most complex and the best of the stories
in the collection, is an example of Anderson's story-telling
art at its best. On the surface it is the story of another
of Anderson's grotesques, a man who is congenitally incapable

of reaching the levels of success that he and society respect.

282.112 alum 2.: 3.11.9. see. 23. 29mm.

16#

His comic efforts to give the public what it wants and the
frustrations that result from his inability to do so are
described by his adolescent son who sympathizes with his
father, but, like the adolescent in “I Want to Know Why,”
is unable to do more than speculate on the causes.

Within this story framework Anderson has not only
provided a sympathetic view of one of the grotesques like
those in Winesbur , but he has attained a symbolic level
that points out the growing frustration with which Anderson
was beginning to regard his inability to understand through
intuition the basic failure of man that made him carry with-
in himself the seeds of his own tragedy. In nature, as the
story shows, the problem of deformity is simple. If the
hand of the Greater slips, the resulting physical grotesque
dies, and the process of reproduction continues. Man’s
problem is more complex, however, because his most serious
deformity is not physical but spiritual, and such deformities,
created by his own failures, are not fatal. In spite of his
grotesqueness, man lives, but because of it he is unable to
find fulfillment. The egg contains the key to the secret of
life, but that secret, like the source of man's deformities,
is hidden by the strong but fragile shell. Both shells re-
sist attempts to steal their secrets until, unable to resist
any more, they explode into chaos. As Anderson said in
~"8eeds," man cannot venture far along the road of.human

lives; the grotesque in each man prevents him from understanding

165

the grotesqueness of others. If he persists in his attempts
he discovers chaos instead of the order he seeks; he is not
merely defeated, but he is made into a fool in the process.

The father in the story is worth further considera-
tion, both as a grotesque who is baffled and helpless as he
fails to recognize this inability to cope with the complex-
ities of a world that has no place for him and as a contrast
to father protrayals in Anderson's earlier works. Here for
the first time Anderson portrays the father as a grotesque,
as a man who is spiritually deformed but nevertheless de-
serving of the compassion that he eventually finds in the
narrator, his own son. In My McPherson'g _S_9_n, Sam had
seen Windy as a fool; in Winesbur , thg, George Willard
saw his father as completely neuter, deserving of neither
compassion nor scorn; while here the son regards his father
with a sympathy and understanding that transcends his obvious
shortcomings. The son is, of course, no more capable of
understanding his father than he is the mystery of the egg,
but be spite of this he recognizes intuitively that his father
is worthy of love, whether understanding of him ever comes or
not.

Through this evolving portrayal of the father image
Anderson is intuitively and unconsciously moving toward
penetrating the shadow of Irwin Anderson that had dominated
his youth, remaining as an unsympathetic, inept figure dur-

ing his business years, and emerging as a caricature of a

 

V8

00

PE

b1

166

wastrel in 113111 ‘McPhersOn’g ggg. Anderson has not yet
consciously attempted to probe his own personal life and
relationships as he is to do during the middle of the 1920's,
but his intuition is preparing him to go beyond appearance
and determine the essential meaning of those experiences and
to know his father. This possibility is not apparent in ”The
Egg," of course, because Anderson does not see it himself,
and in the story the father remains forever unknowable and
alone.

This note of frustration at the hopelessness of the
situation each central figure is caught in continues through-
out the collection, with nothing to mitigate it as the central
figure of George Willard counteracted the hopelessness of the
individual grotesques in Winesburg,'ghig as he moved toward
eventual understanding of them. The people in the stories
are completely unable to penetrate their isolation, even
though they catch occasional glimpses of the liberated life
outside themselves, because there is no one they can approach
without being completely misunderstood. In ”Unlighted Lamps”
this difficulty is especially obvious, as a young girls seeks
love and understanding first from her father and then from a
young man. Repulsed by her father and completely misunder- ‘
stood by the young man, the girl is alone at the and, lost
and unfulfilled.

The other stories combine to turn this hopelessness
into despair; ”Senility” portrays an old young man who can

167

euro "coughs, colds, consumption, and the sickness that
bleeds"30 but not the sickness in his own heart. ”The

Man in the Brown Coat" parallels this story on andther
level as its central figure, a college professor, learns to
understand the secrets of ancient civilizations but not the
secret that will enable understanding and love to grow be-
tween him and his wife. He is "...as alone as ever any man
God made,"31 Anderson comments as he too is left to sit in
hopelessness.

In two of the stories, ”Brothers” and ”The Door of
the Trap” Anderson shows the fate of two people who attempt
to penetrate the barriers isolating them from others. In
the former the old man who proclaims his kinship with other
men is called insane; in the latter, another college pro-
fessor realizes that his efforts can only be misunderstood
and so, like Doctor Reefy in ”Paper Pills” he voluntarily
withdraws from his efforts and becomes another unfulfilled
grotesque. The sketches "War” and ”Motherhood” reinforce
and extend the air of despair that emanates from each of
these lives as they point out that man's only hope lies
not in personal fulfillment'but in the mindless impersons
ality that makes the cycle of life go on.

Paralleling the adolescent initiation into the im-
ponderability of life in ”I want to Know‘Why" is that of

 

Boggy—1&0! 930 Bllbido, 100.

168

the emotionally adolescent spinster in ”The Hew'Englander."
Here, too, the story goes beyond the theme of mere initia-
tion and portrays adult frustration and despair. Trans-
planted to the new, fertile land of the Midwest. the woman
finds that human society, characterized by the sterile ideas
of dead men, forbids her to emulate that fertility by find-
ing acceptance and understanding, and she, too, learns the
futility and hopelessness of trying to break through her
isolation and find understanding and fulfillment.

The intensity of the despair that permeates the volume
is epitomized by the last story, "Out of Nowhere Into Nothing,”
as Anderson documents the title by a story that shows not
only the rigidity of man's prison of unfulfilled and unknown
self but goes beyond this point to intensify man's sense of
aloneness by permitting him to hope for liberation and to
see the possibility of it almost within.grasp, only to find
himself mistaken in what liberation is as it turns ironically
into the same sort of misunderstanding that he has been
fleeing. The story of a young girl who goes from her small
town home to the city and finally back to the town in her
search, "Out of‘Nowhere Into Nothing” plays an important
part in.Anderson?s analysis of contemporary life. Here the
heroine has given up the battle Tn the city; it, she feels,
has already been lost, and she has returned to the town for
the final struggle against dehumanization.and isolation.
Instinctively the girl feels that somewhere in the people

169

of the town there is meaning, but after thinking she has
found it and then realizing her folly, she is left with no
choice but to run off into the night, into the emptiness
that had characterized her life. Here Anderson foreshadows
his own return to the town and his own intuitive hope that
he may find meaning there.

Concluding the volume with his statement that men can
do nothing but run from life with ”fleeing harried minds,"32
Anderson concludes his examination of all these facets of
human life lost in despair. Up to this point, no matter how
desperate the situation might appear in each of the earlier
works, at the end he had shown that there was at least hope
that individual human beings might be able to break through
the barriers that kept them from finding fulfillment in love
and understanding mutually achieved. Here, however, there is
none. As he had learned earlier that mere rebellion and in-
tense desire are not enough to liberate the individual, so
here he shows that he has learned something else: that
there are limits to the intuitive understanding that he had
had such high hopes for as he concluded Winesbur ,‘thg.
Intuition, like rebellion, is not an end in itself; it is
merely a means to an end, and neither alone is sufficiently
strong to carry the individual through to ultbmate realiza-
tion.

321bid., 269.

I”—

 

 

 

170

In _Thg Triumph 9; _thg Egg Anderson recognizes the
triumph of the imponderables as he documents the lot of
his people who, frustrated and bewildered at every point,
can only conclude that they have come out of‘nowhere, that
their lives are completely hopeless, and that they can end
the torment of their existence only when they as indivi-
duals go back to the emptiness of their origins. Life may
continue its immutable cycle, but there is no hope for the
individual. At this low point, completely frustrated by
such a situation and blinded by despair, Anderson’s people
are ready for another sort of rebellion, a blind and mind-
less striking out at the forces that are destroying their
identities; Just as the Marchng y_e_i_1_ movement was an attempt
to break down the barriers between people by force, so is
the futile assault against the ”creeping crawling things“33
that Anderson.portrays in his next work, the novel M521
Marriages.

As a whole, _T_1_1_e_ Triumph of the 1:355 is a solid literary
achievement. Two of the stories, ”I Want to Know Why" and
”The Egg,” are among the best that Anderson was ever to
write, and ”Seeds,” ”The New Englander,” and ”Out of Nowhere
Into Nothing” are more complex althoughfnot as well executed.
The latter two, especially, seem more like first drafts than

perfected works because structural awkwardnesses occur and

33lbid., 32.

171

the symbolic structure is somewhat hazy. Hewever, none of
the stories is a failure although the prose poems used as
preface and conclusion.are redundant in the light of the
sustained impact of the theme.

The volume is not as effective as Winesburg,‘ghig,
not only because the stories are uneven in execution but
because it lacks the unity in setting and characterization
of the earlier volume and, more importantly, because the
steady, insistent note of hopelessness in all the stories
tends to callous the reader's mind with its repetition long
before the final note.of despair is struck. Like Winesbur ,
however, the collection is about people, all of them different,
all of them human, and all of them effectively portrayed.
Just as Winesburg provided a cross section of village life
as it presented the individual people of the town, The Triumph
g the Egg presents a cross section that transcends the
boundaries of village life and comes closer to a portrait
of the people of Anderson's Mid-Americas they emerge from
the village and move into the world. As in.§ggrjflhitg, the
frustrations that make men grotesques in this work are in-
creasingly the products of society and of economics rather
than.men's own limited vision.

In the context of Anderson's work at this point the
ensnarement of his people and their ensuing despair is no
accident as the cumulative intensity of the theme shows.

When the works are considered as individual stories rather

172

,than a unified whole, much of that intensity is lost, and
resulttng interpretations see only part of the whole. This
loss results in an undue emphasis upon Anderson's view of
sex as frightening or unwholesome, but in the context of
the collection unsatisfactory sex is shown as only one of
the many manifestations of the isolating barrier between
men. ”I Want to Know Why? then becomes not merely ”...the
awakening of sex in a boy of fifteen"34 but a desperate,
frustrated plea for insight into the seeming imponderability
of human life, a naive pleas that only an adolescent is
free to make, and "Out of Nowhere Into Nothing" reflects
the hopeless confusion of an adult who has learned that he
can never find the answer to that question.

Further documentation of the fact that this over-
whelming air of despair in the work is no accident is seen
in Anderson's actions after the book had been published.

As it began to sell fairly well, he took the gig; prize

money and went South again, to New Orleans, leaving Tennessee
and advertising behind him. There he began sustained work on
Egg; Marriages, evidently again at peace with himself. In
February, 1922, he wrote Gertrude Stein that ”I came down
here about a month ago and am living in the Old French

Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I've found in

 

3“Schevill , 162.

173

America, and have been writing like a man gone mad ever
since I got off the train."35 In addition to the novel,

he continued prose poem experimentation and work on short
stories, but he knew that this period was only a temporary
respite. He had to decide his future course with both his
wife and the advertising business. Late that spring he re-
turned to Chicago. That summer he made his final break with
both and headed east.

Anderson's goal was New Yerk, but his trip there was
slow and uncertain, and he was evidently undergoing a soul-
searching as intense as that which had brought him to ner-
vous exhaustion Just before he left Elyria. This was un-
doubtedly the time that he stopped in Elyria ”...to try to
arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism."36 He
wandered around the old scenes; he saw that another name
had replaced his on the paint factory sign that he had
erected so proudly; anonymously he passed his former banker
in the street; in the process he knew that he had made an-
other irrevocable move and that advertising and Tennessee
were as far removed from his'life as were paint manufactur-
ing and Cornelia. He continued his trip to New'Iork, revewed

in his determination.to remain free and to write.

 

35Letters, 87.

36A $931 Teller'_s_ Story, 316.

17G

In.New York Anderson underwent a period of discovery
similar to but far less intense than that after his original
flight from Elyria. The literary circle in which he found
himself was far more subdued and a bit older than the
Chicago Liberation group. He became close friends with
Alfred Stieglitz, a craftsman-photographer for whom Ander-
son had deep respect; he renewed hisfriendship with Paul
Rosenfeld; and he met Elizabeth Prall, who was to become
his third wife. His days were devoted to working on.Mggy
Marriages and on.short fiction, and his evenings to plays
and conversation.

M321 Marriages was finished late that fall, and it
was published in February, 1923. During the intervening
months, with the pressures of sustained composition eased,
Anderson and Elizabeth saw a great deal of each other.
Before long they were in love. At this time a shorter
version of Many Marriages was appearing serially in 1139 _D_i;s_._]_._,
and his literary reputation in.New York was growing. Miss A
Prall was a quiet, well-educated intellectual, and perhaps
each of them saw in the other an ideal realized. To the
bookish young woman Anderson was a literary lion, while to
Anderson Elizabeth was a new anchor that would halt his'in-
creasing restlessness and at the same time complement his
increasing literary respectability and acceptance. Shortly 1
after the beginning of 1923 they decided to be married, and
in February Anderson went to Reno, Nevada, to get a divorce

from Tennessee.

175

Almost simultaneously with this trip, 59;; 119.122.319.53.
appeared. In this novel Anderson has taken up the offen-
sive against the social forces that have frustrated his
people and driven them into despair. This novel is a pro-
duct of that despair, Just as Marching Men was the product
of his earlier hopelessness in Elyria. Like Marchlng Egg,
this novel goes beyond mere rebellion.and attacks the source
of despair head-on, and like his earlier attack this, too,
is fordoOmed to failure because it is instinctive rather
than rational and blind rather than directed.

The novel is a direct outgrowth of the belief ex-
pressed in "Seeds” that we are ”...covered with creeping
crawling things37...choked by climbing vines...[3§7 old
thoughts and beliefs planted by dead menu"38 and as that
story and many of the others following it point out, the
most deadly and the most unnecessary of these forces is the
perversion of the potentially mutually fulfulling sex act ‘
into a secret sin, and Many Marraiges is an attempt to ex-
- pose that error for what it is.

The resulting novel was one of the most startling
and controversial of its day. Hailed as a masterpiece by
such of Anderson's contemporaries as Theodore Drieser and

Scott Fitzgerald, it began to sell very well, and Anderson’s,

 

37111.2 _Uium h 9.1 the as. 32.

331bid., 23.

176

decision to leave the security of advertising seemed Just-
ified. But a strong reaction against the nature of the
book set in; it was condemned in New England, libraries
refused to but it, and even booksellers were keeping it
under the counter. It became known as a dirty book in a
day when puritan influences were still strong enough to
prevent its wide dissemination, and the sales dwindled to
nothing. The book has never been reprinted.

Contemporary criticism has preferred to see it re-
main hidden, primarily because it is considered an unfortu-
nate lapse in what had to this point been a growing literary
career and reputation. On artistic grounds this decision
is Justifiable; M321 Marriages is not a good novel, and it
is far from Anderson at his best, especially in the short
fiction that preceded and followed it. Yet, to ignore it
with conventional adverse criticism about the defects in
structure and symbolism that mar the book is dangerous.
From the point of view of Anderson's continued search for
self-identity and for extension of his identity into final
understanding of the American Midwestern experience, ESE!
Marrigges is very important.

The novel is, as previously indicated, a mindless
rebellion growing out of frustration and despair, an
offensive against stifling and dehumanizing convention.
Essentially it describesihe attempt of John Webster, a

small-town manufacturer of washing machines, to break

177

through the accumulated morass of middle class values and
to find personal fulfillment, leaving home, family, busi-
ness, and social position behind him as he runs off with
his secretary. To this point the novel appears to be an-
other retelling of Anderson's theme of rebellion, with moral
standards the villain instead of industrialism. The differ-
ence here becomes more important than.the similarity, how-
ever, because the rebellion and its aftermath take on ramifi-
cations that never would have occurred to the Anderson of
the earlier period but that are products of Anderson's new
awareness of the complexity of standards of values and be-
havior and of their effect on the individual.

One of the most important distinctions is that Webster
was not a self-made man as were the earlier Andersonian
heroes. Having inherited his ideas along with his business
and social position, his questioning of them does not result
from physical acts, as is the case with the earlier pro-
tagonists,'but from intuition, from a vague feeling that
something is wrong with those values. This sense grows
stronger until Webster realizes that they are denials of
the right of the individual to know and to fulfill himself
through others. As he comes to recognize this feeling as
valid, it becomes epitomized in his relationship with his
wife, and the rebellion follows, culminating in a long,
symbol-strewn scene in which.he tries to explain and Just-
ify his actions to his daughter so that she may escape the

178

ruinous effects of conventional mores, and then he goes
off with his secretary into what he hopes will be a life
of fulfillment.

Thus examined superficially, the book appears to be
a symbolic representation of the intellectual revolt of
the Chicago Liberation during the previous fifteen years
and of the expatriate movement then going on, but beneath
this surface treatment three factors are evident that die-
tinguish.Anderson's attempts in this book from his earlier
rebellion against industrialism and his participation in
the later intellectual revolt. First is the fact that
Webster himself is a grotesque and remains one to the end;
second is the long explanation that occupies most of the
book; and third is the ending itself, which contrasts strongly
with the optimism of the endings of the earlier novels and
with the spirit of artistic liberation.

The first of these factors, the grotesqueness of John
Webster, places his hero in the same category as the people
of whom he had been writing since he started the Winesburg
stories, and Webster is at once a refinement and an exten-
sion of the type of warped personality that results from
the isolation of the individual both from self-knowledge
and fulfillment and from effective communication with his
fellows. Unlike the Andersonian heroes of ling; McPherson'g
ggg, Marchigg Man, and £935 M, Webster is unable to find
the hope of eventual fulfillment through the act of withdnndng,

179

but, like the people of Winesburg, he can only hope to
find it through indentifying himself, his hopes, and his
dreams with another person. Inlfiinggpggg,‘ghig George
Willard did not understand the grotesques who sought him
out, partially because they did not understand themselves
and partially because of George Willard's inadequacy. The
same situation exists here. Webster seeks understanding
from his daughter and from his secretary, but there is no
evidence that either understands, and in spite of his re-
bellion he remains as isolated, as far from reaching under-
standing and fulfillment, and as tragic as any of the earlier
grotesques. In effect, Webster, like the central figures of
Th2 Triumph‘gfmthg'ggg, has passed out of nowhere into
nothing. The thought that the hero could remain unfulfilled
would be heresy either to Sam McPherson or to the liberated
individual of the artistic rebellions of the time.

The long explanation that occupies much of the book
is also a strong and significant contrast to both of these
factors. This is not only the plea for understanding in
which the grotesques of Winesburg indulged themselves, and
it is not merely the plea for sexual liberation that most
critics call it, although these are part of the whole, but
it is primarily the extended verbalization of the frustrated
grotesques who have been victimized by personal or societal
factors since the dead ideas of dead men first began warp-
ing human personality. Simply stated, it is a protest against

180

the shortcomings inherent in human relationships: the lack
of ability to communicate and to reciprocate understanding
and love; and the tendency to accept the surface values of
relationships rather than to probe their essence. These
shortcomings were what eventually trapped Sam.McPherson and
Beaut McGregor into accepting pat instead of intrinsic
answers, and they were the same shortcomings that allowed
the liberation movement to become stagnated in perpetuating
the act of rebellion and prevented it from going on to the
understanding Anderson sought.

Because Anderson couched this long protest in sexual
and ritualistic symbols without making them clear, the sym-
bols have become mistaken for the thing symbolized. The
passage was intended to be shocking so that it would be
eloquent and forceful in calling attention to the shortcom-
ings in human relations, but the impact was such that the
passage failed in its purpose, and its cymbalism as well as/fl
that of the title lost its significance. "How many marriages.
among peOple!”39 Anderson cries out, but he is not merely
regretting those made according to law, the most common, the I
most abused and abusing; rather, he is protesting that the I
important marriages, those of human sympathy and understand-
ing, have been made impotent by man-made and perpetuated

errors 0

39Sherweed Anderson, Many Marriages (New York, 1923),
193.

181

The third factor that marks a contrast between the
ending of M Marriages and the optimism with which Ander-
son concluded the earlier novels and adopted the spirit of
the liberation is the outcome of John Webster's rebellion.
At the end of the novel he was as trapped by the demands
inherent in his decision as he had been before; the outward
signs of ensnarement had changed,1ut inwardly he realized
that he had merely traded one set of limiting and dehuman-
izing values for another. He still had no understanding of
himself; the secretary at his side was a stranger; and he
had no choice but to continue to carry through his rebellion.
He could not turn back, nor could he assume that he was mov-
ing forward into realization. Rather, in spite of the de-
cisiveness of his act, he did not walk forward into the
future confidently; instead he ventured uncertainly into
the unknown. The rejection of convention had been accomp-
lished, but after the purging of his emotions through the
long, ritualistic explanation, he was left with nothing.

‘gggyiMarriages then is a product of'Anderson's attempt
to understand the world around him in terms of the grotesques
who populate it, and like The Triumph 2; _thg Egg, in its re-
Jection of easy solutions to the problem of human isolation
it becomes a document of frustration and hopelessness. No
longer can the individual find fulfillment in the act of re-
belling, as Anderson has learned; to think that one can is
merely to delude one's self. Rebellion is a beginning, not

182

an end in itself, but once the act has been accomplished,
one has no choice except to go on searching for the answers
to that problem. At this stage, as Anderson sees the indi-
vidual frustrated and defeated all around him, he feels that
the chances of success are very slight, but he must go on
searching.

EEEIZMarriages is neither a good novel nor is it bad
enough to consign it permanently to oblivion, as critics who
mention it prefer to do. Of course, to regard it with the
high praise of many of Anderson's contemporaries is absurd,
but to ignore the important position that it occupies in the
chronology of Anderson's work is equally absurd. Behind the
many excesses with which Anderson cloaked it is a thematic
statement that is simple yet profound, and it is not trivial.
Unfortunately and rightfully, however, a writer cannot expect
his reader to fight his way through a mess of undigested
symbols that in effect become red herrings before emerging
with full understanding of the author's purpose.

The weaknesses in the novel are, of course, serious.
The worst defect is structural, especially in the fact that
Anderson devotes more than half of the novel to the long,
cumbersome explanation that Webster makes to his daughter.
Actually this incident‘i§,the novel, and the events leading
up to and following it are mere framework. While explanation
and protest are what Anderson was trying to empress in the

novel, nevertheless the incident has been padded to the point

183

where it loses most of its dramatic impact through constant
repetition and through the introduction of so much shocking
material that it loses its value as an attention-getting
device and becomes the center of attention. This can only
result in detracting from the value of the novel from an
artistic as well as from an ideological point of view.

Not quite as serious but equally annoying is the general
air of excess about the book, especially in the actions of
John Webster and in.Anderson's attempts to attain universal
significance through the use of symbol. Webster's eccentrici-
ties and nudity serve a limited purpose, as do the symbols of
the Virgin, the candles, the ”Jewel of Life,” and Webster's
ritualistic actions, but the emphasis upon substance rather
than appearance that these things represent becomes lost,
and they become merely trite and meaningless, so much so
that even Anderson himself abandons them after haying made
them so obvious. .

There are, of course, many possible explanations for
the fact that these defects appeared in a work so soon after
the first-rate work in Winesburg, ghig, Eggg_flhitg, and Egg
Triumph g; the Egg. The most plausible are two: first
that the ”irresistible impulse” that Anderson.maintains
compelled him to expand the'Qgg; version into a novel was
Just that. Anderson.felt himself frustrated both in his
personal life and in.his work. The difficulties of earn-
ing a living, publishing his work, and attempting to undo

184

the mistake he had made in marrying Tennessee had combined
with his encounter of social disapproval in his attempts to
be honest in.his work at the same time that he was discover-
ing the hopelessness of the lot of the little people with
whom he was dealing. The result was an explosion, an ill-
considered novel that was primarily a vehicle of rebellion
and denunciation.

A second possibility is that Anderson was conscious
of the fact that this, like Winesbur , ghig, might be con-
sidered a dirty book, and in his desperate efforts to con-
vey the implication that sex was a mere symbol of a more
serious malady he piled symbol upon symbol in such confusion
that an idea that was perfectly clean to him became obscure
to his readers, and in the process he compounded his diffi-
culties by distorting his original purpose into something
he hadn't intended. His letters of this period are evidence
that he had taken such criticism strongly enough for it to
have had this effect on his work.

Weak though it is as a novel, M W has a
valid point to make, that many of the standards of value
and behavior in our society work irreparable damage to the
psychological structures of the peeple who live in accordance
with them. Although he has not formulated any answers to
this problem, he is focusing on.it. What is lacking,
however, is the indication that Anderson is yet'beginning
to understand the origin or>nature of these standards. As

Many Marriages ends, he is contemplating them in despair.

 

i.

 

185

While‘gggy Marrigges ran its brief course, Anderson
remained in Reno, establishing the six weeks of residency
needed for a divorce, but Tennessee, who had long pro-
claimed in keeping with the spirit of the Liberation that
marriage should be mutually liberating rather than cone
fining, refused to give her consent, and Anderson remained
in Reno until January, 1924, when Tennessee finally con-
sented. Here he put the finishing touches on another book
of stories, Horses ggguggg, and started the impressionistic
memoir that was to become _A M T__e_ll_er_'g _S__t_o_1. The mood
of frustration remained with him in spite of his enthusiasm
for the desert and the mountains, and the enforced loneli-
ness made him start to re-examine himself and his beliefs.
Shortly after his arrival there he wrote, ”There is so little
one man can do for another. What is to be said? What is to
be done?",40 and again, ”I know I do not want New York and
the neurotics any more for a long, long time. I've got some
seeds in me, and if they'll sprout, I‘ll grow a little
fruit..."4'1 0f himself he thought ”...I've had too much
prominence. It isn’t any good. It's bunk."42

This desire for withdrawal and a sense of personal as
well as philosophic futility dominated his thinking, and
his many letters from Reno not only reiterate and emphasize

his moods but they point out his efforts to reach out to

“Letters, 94. “rpm. 421cm.

186

and hold onto his friends, especially Gertrude Stein, Van
wyck Brooks, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jerome and Lucile Blum.
To them he wrote primarily of himself but not about himself.
'Rather the letters, like John Webster's long performance
in.g§gy Marria es, were attempts to verbalize his beliefs
so that he could not only make himself understood but so
that he could understand them himself. The basis of his
belief he recognized early: "You see...I believe in this
damn mixed-up country of ours. In an odd way I'm in love
with it. And you get into it, in my sense of it, quite
tremendously,”43 but this was Just a beginning. Here in
Reno he was beginning a period of personal analysis in an
effort to know and understand himself and his beliefs. His
attempts to understand the American Midwestern experience
through the medium of the intuition that had promised so
much in the Winesburg stories had resulted in frustration
and despair, and he was casting about for a new approach,

a process that would occupy him for five years.

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1923, 523225. and .1533 was
published. The critical reception was generally enthusias-
tic, but he seems to have paid little attention to it after
it was published. This volume was the last expression of
the hopelessness out of which he had begun to emerge. In

this collection, similar in scope and approach to The

 

”Baa. . 95.

187

Triumph gf‘thg‘ggg, Anderson carries on the sense of despair
of that and.gggz Marriages to a point suggestive of touches
of insanity and psychological torment tn the makeup of his
people. This collection, too, contains some of his best
short stories, and here, too, much of their significance
beyond the particular is lost when they are taken out of
the context of the collection.

In this volume Anderson makes use of an introductory
foreword to set the tone of the theme as he had used the
prose poem in Th3 Triumph‘gf'tthggg and the sketch in
Winesburg,IQg;g, His purpose, as he points out, is as it
had been in the past, to probe beneath the dark surface of
life and to get at its essence; but almost immediately the
self-doubts, the uncertainty, and the frustration of this
period make themselves felt. Almost as a continuation of
John webster's uncertainty as‘gggz_Marri§ges ends, Anderson
goes on: ”I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing
has any existence."44 Yet he still hopes that he is wrong.
”Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment,
out of the world of darkness into the light?"45 The un-
certainty continues: "It may be that my eyes are blind...
It may be I am deaf...Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking

¥

44Sherwood Anderson, Horses and Men.(New Ubrk, 1923).

ix.

451b1d . , 1x-x .

188

at my own hands. With these nervous and uncertain hsmds
may I really feel for the form of things concealed in the
darkness?"46 There is no answer to his uncertainty, and
he had no choice but to go on, hoping somehow that he can
discover whatever meaning there may be through the gentle,
compassionate use of his intuition.

The thematic pattern shows an evolving development
in this collection much as did those in both Winesburg,
_O_h_i_g and _Th3 Triumph p; _thp Egg, but here Anderson starts
on‘ a level of frustration and despair in the foreword and
carries through on that level until the final third, when,
in spite of the evidence against it, he begins to show a
cautious and subdued optimism based more on faith than on
any real belief that the individual can find fulfillment.
For the most part, however, his people remain frustrated
and despairing until their repression intensifies to the
point that they seem ready for the sort of mindless rebellion
that John Webster waged. They do not quite reach that point
in any of the stories, however, not because the people are
unwilling or afraid to rebel but because they are too. blinded
by their despair to besble to single out any particular thing
and attack it as John Webster had done.

Like th Triumph p; 3133 Egg, E93322 ppg ypp opens

with a story that, centers wound a boy who likes horses and

 

45Ibid.. X.

189

who finds that the society of men in the world is infinitely
more complex than that in the stables. In this story, ”I'm
a Fool,” Anderson agarn uses the framework of the adolescent
initiation theme on which he constructs a story that goes
beyond its framework and emerges into adult recognition of
the potential destructiveness inherent in the superficial
and materialistic conventional standards of value. As in
”I Want to Know Why,” the air of personal futility that
accompanies this discovery is minimized and becomes less
effective when the story is taken out of the context of the
collection.

The story is that of a boy growing into manhood as he
follows the Ohio racetrack circuit. In the stables, working
as a swipe, he lives a life that, while sometimes brutal and
often crude, is nevertheless innocent, honest, and uncompli-
cated. On his day off he pretends to be a dude in order to
gain favor with a young lady. She accepts him, but the
fabrication of lies that he had erected to impress her be-
comes a more effective barrier between them than that of
social status he had lied to overcome. At the end, conclud-
ing that he was a fool for permitting himself to think those
standards important enough to lie about, he is ready to
strike out at the symbol of those standards, a real dude
whom he imagined himself to be competing with, and he feels
like kicking himself, but the dude is gone, and he feels
that kicking himself is futile.

y. .

 

190

Here Anderson is moving out of the specific and into
the universal in the same way as in the other racetrack
stories of this period, and in doing so he points out the
same sort of paradox. Man can be exposed to what is mean-
ingful, honest, and worthwhile in life, as are all of his
wwracetract people, and yet he is unable to act in accordance
with.his intuitional perception of these values when society
demands acceptance of its contradictory values that are based
upon appearance rather than intrinsic worth. In.both ”I'm
a Fool” and ”I Want to Know‘Why” the protagonists raise this
question but find no answers; in the latter the protagonist
has not yet had to make a choice between them, but in the
former, having been seduced, he is ready for rebellion al-
though he has no idea of Just what to oppose. The complex-
'ities of the situation are beyond him, and he can only despair
in his frustration.

Even the act of rebellion itself presents a paradox:
because society has so dominated the individual, his re-
bellion can only be on society's terms, and he tends not
only to attempt to rationalize his actions in relationship
to social values, but he even interprets them as anti-social
acts and hence recognizes that society has the right to
punish his transgressions. This is certainly the case with
John Webster in yin; Marria es, and here in "I'm a Feel”
the young man's attempt to ”show" society, essentially an

act of rebellion, is couched in acceptance of society's

191

standards, even.while he knows that they are essentially
meaningless, and his regret at the end is not based on his
acceptance of them but is based on his lying, actually an
anti-social act. Here Anderson continues to show that
more rebellion is not enough, that one must know his enemy
before he can go on to fulfillment, but the complexities
one must straighten out before he can understand the pro-
blem are still not only unresolved but at this point ap-
parently unresolvable.

In the short sketch "The Triumph of a Modern" Anderson
continues in this vein, but here for the first time he
approaches the problem in terms of the modernist revolt in
which he had participated in Chicago during the Liberation.
In this story a "liberated" young man who prides himself on
his rejection of puritan patterns of behavior writes an
intimate letter to a maiden aunt he had never seen. De-
liberately employing the word breasts rather than the con-
ventional bosom in a carefully-contrived emotional passage
lin order to convey an unfelt love for her, he so impresses
her that she wills him her fortune.

Here Anderson deals with a theme to which he returns
later in detail in Qppk Lapghter: the fact that even the
act of rebelling against these dead ideas may be false and
dishonest, that it may be perverted by its participants
who find in it an excuse or a tool for selfish purposes
rather than the honest attempt to strike out at the forces

192

that deny man his fulfillment. His disillusionment with
both the Chicago and the New Yerk modernist movements and
his disenchantment with the kind of marriage that he had
with Tennessee are more than mere restlessness, as this
story indicates. His objections to the new philosophy of
liberation seem to have been based on his conviction that
the movements had become ends in themselves rather than
means to- the end of eventual human fulfillment. In this
story he indicates that the liberation impulse had led him
to a blind alley, and the depth of his frustration is in-
dicated by the irony of the title.

It would be interesting to know if Anderson had in
mind the reception of both Winesburg,19p;p and.Mppy Marriages
when he wrote this story. Both were hailed among liberated
I circles as calls for rebellion against puritanical sex
standards. That Anderson had a far greater and more inclu-
sive problem in mind is evident from his reaction to these
interpretations, and his disappointment at the narrow inter-
pretations of the works must have given him a great deal of
insight into the short-sightedness of the movement which,
as he indicated in letters from Reno, had attracted neu-
rotics rather than seekers. In this study Anderson reJects
the movement that he had thought held the power to liberate
the individual so that he could find fulfillment and under-
standing because it had become dominated by the same sort
of dishonesty it had ostensibly been fighting. As a result,

193

at this wage Anderson has no place to go except deeper into
despair. More seriously, however, he points out that the
real tragedy of the modernist movement lies in the fact
that it does not recognize the evil it has done in the name
of honesty.

These first two stories set the pattern for the rest
of the collection, both structurally and thematically. In
order to give an organizational framework to the collection
he alternates as he has in these two between a rural agri-
cultural setting and an urban commercial setting, each pair
of stories designed to be mutually complimentary as the same
basic factor enters to defeat fulfillment in each of the
pair, regardless of background. In the first pair each
young man has‘been defeated because he fails to distinguish
between appearance and reality and finds himself willing to
lie in order to gain in appearance, at the same time fail-
ing to realize that he has cut himself off from reality as
he does so. In each case the lack of ability to make the
preper distinction is complicated by the failure of the
young man to realize that one cannot gain truth.by reject-
ing. This is the real prison that, as Anderson.indicates,
will keep them from fulfillment and understanding forever.
Rebellion is futile unless it is honest rebellion that
precedes the search for truth.

”Unused” and ”A Chicago Hamlet” continue this pair-

ing of setting and theme, both of them concerned.with

194

people whose efforts to carry through an honest rebellion
against conventional standards and to live as individuals
result in tragedy. The first, set in Bidwell, Ohio, con-
cerns a young girl from a disreputable background whose
efforts to rise out of it are frustrated by misinterpreta-
tion until in despair she runs into the lake and drowns;
the second, set in Chicago, records the story of a man who
”...had gone the same road I and all the men about me were
no doubt going, the road of surrender to ugliness and to
dreary meaningless llvlng."47 His efforts to break out of
this path were frustrated to the point where, dead spirit-
ually, he could only say, ”It is horrible stuff, this whis-
key, eh, but after all this is a horrible town."48 Out of
the despair that this tragedy engenders, the narrator can
only cry out:
Millions of us live on the vast Chicago West

Side, where all streets are equally ugly and

where the streets go on and on forever, out of

nowhere into nothing. We are tired, tired!

What is it all about749

In these two stories Anderson looks at honest attempts
to rebel and to carry rebellion through to understanding and
fulfillment, but in each case the act is destined to be
futile from its inception. The preconceptions and superfi-
vial Judgments of society have placed each person in a pre-

determined category, and attempts to transgress these limits

 

“7gplg., 143. 4811mm, 158. 49lb1d., 140.

195

have been.made so difficult that the individual, frustrated
and despairing, finds himself no longer able to live under
such conditions. Physical death or the oblivion that comes
in bottles is the individual‘s only recourse. In the former
story the narrator is filled with compassion as he views the
girl's body, but the memory of her bedraggled ostrich feather,
symbol of her frustrated attempt to find beauty, throws him
into continued despair. The narrator of the latter story
re-emphasizes this despair as he recounts his friend‘s
drunken attempt to escape his recurrent dream of a slender
and beautiful woman who, as she comes closer, is revealed

to be broken in.pieces, a grim caricature of beauty. In
these two stories Anderson shows his conviction that the
rebellion of his grotesques, the meek who inhabit his world,
can only result in intensified tragedy.

In.the next pair of stories, ”The Man Who Became a
Wbman” and "Milk Bottles” Anderson writes of another facet
of the hopeless lot of his people in depicting two young
‘ men who have been forced todeny their individuality. Here
the penalties of non-conformity are are brought home to both
in moments of horror, in the first case among the discarded
bones of an abandoned slaughterhouse and in the latter in
the grimness of rubbish heaps in the shadow of a tenement.
In both cases the protagonists' dreams of fulfillment are
left behind to Join the rubbish of a civilization that is
devoted to consumption of men and dreams as well as things.

/

196

"The Man Who Became a Wbman" is one of Anderson's
best stories, ranking with ”The Egg" and "I Want to Know
Why.” Another of his stories dealing ostensibly with an
adolescent lover of race horses and racetrack naturabness,
this, too, goes beyond mere adolescent initiation and
beyond the concept of homosexuality implied in the title
because in it Anderson comes close to identifying the source
of much of the difficulty in which man.finds himself as the
two sides of his nature, the brutalness of masculinity and
the compassion of femininity, clash within him. In this
story he points out society's demand that brutality over-
come compassion, and that the individual has no choice but
to yield.

This story, like "Unused,” is told by an adult nar-
rater who is looking back on an adventure in his youth, but
here the narrator has completely lost sight of the signifi-
cance of the incident, yet he is driven to explain it, much
as John Webster is driven to explanation, almost as though
exPlanation will make the meaning of the act clear to him
as well as to his audience. However, the audience is given
no indication that understanding occurs. Rather, the story
ends with the narrator still plagued by the intuitive feel-
ing that in.sccepting the dictates of convention he was sur-
rendered a major part of his personality and has cut himself

off from fulfillment. The key to nullifying this surrender

197

is hidden somewhere in the act, as he realizes in adult-
hood, but he is unable to find it.

Briefly the story recounts the adventure of a night on
the racetrack circuit. The boy, left alone at the track,
decides to go to town. Stopping in a rough bar, he remem-
bers past dreams in which he thought he was a girl. Looking
into the mirror behind the bar he sees that his face looks
like a girl's, and afraid, he decides to leave. A giant
brute of a man enters, starts a fight, and in the ensuring
disorder, gives the boy a chance to flee. Still frightened,
he runs back to the stables to sleep, but he is awakened by
two drunken negro swipes who mistake him for a girl, and
again frightened, he runs off. In the dark he runs behind
an old slaughter house, where he falls into a pile of bones
and remains hidden for the night. His terror is so strong
that ”It burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl
right out of me,"50 and the next day he left the racetrack
forever.

Such a brief telling of the plot fails to indicate
the complex symbolic structure that Anderson has kept under
careful control. The comparison between men and horses is
used as a contrast between uncomplicated beauty and dis-
torted ugliness, as in the earlier racetrack stories, and

it provides the opportunity for expression of Anderson's

5°Ib1d., 225.

198

bitterness: "A race horse isn't like a human being. He
won't stand for it to have to do his work in any rotten
ugly kind of a dump the way a man will, and he won’t stand
for the smells a man will either."51 Such a view of the
nature of man is bitter enough as it stands, but Anderson
goes beyond this in the despair he displays at the resolu-
tion of his theme.

Man's lot is hopeless, he points out, because he per-
mits and even encourages the brutal side of his nature to
destroy his innate understanding, compassion, and intuitive
perception, the only tools that he has for becoming a com-
plete individual and for breaking down the barriers that
isolate him from others. As the scene in the saloon indi-
cates, society interprets these tools as degeneracy, and in
order to live within society's framework he is forced not
only to deny them but to destroy them in himself. In this
story Anderson is not writing of the revolt of the tortured,
as he had in the preceding pair of stories; rather, he is
writing of the majority of men who have been forced to
deny part of their natures and to live as grotesque carica-
tures of themselVes.

Imposing such a thematic structure upon the framework

of this story calls for careful and complete control of

 

V

511bld., 204.

199

materials, and the skill with which it was executed both
structurally and stylistically makes the story one of
Anderson's best.

Such an attempt might easily have been offensive,
as Map; Marriages was to so many people, because this story
has such strong overtones of one of society's strongest
taboos. Just as sexual license and implied incest have
been read into Mgpy Marripges, so might this be considered
a story of latent homosexuality rather than the duality of
man's nature, but Anderson's careful execution, always at
its best in the short stories, makes such an interpretation
impossible for the perceptive reader. For the less percep-
tive Anderson points out through his narrator that appear-
ances are not indicative of the nature of underlying reality:
”...a man here don't dare own up he loves another man, I've
found out, and they are afraidb admit such feelings to
themselves even. I guess they're afraid it may be taken
to mean something it don't need to at all."52

This statement carries further implications at this
point in its reflection of the fact that Anderson has not
completely given up hope in spite of the overwhelming evi-
dence to the contrary. Here the narrator catches a glimpse

of the necessary distinctions between appearance and reality,

 

521bid., 188.

200

and the mere fact that he is compelled to tell the story
indicates that he instinctively realizes that somewhere
under the appearance of the incident there is truth, but
as the story ends the narrator has failed to find it, and
he remains a grotesque, deprived of the fulfillment that
he might have found.

Paired with this story is "Milk Bottles,” a less
ambitious but no less definitive reiteration of the same
theme. Here a young advertising writer tries to write what
he feels is true, but the combination of the lies by which
he earns his living and the grimness of his surroundings
makes it impossible for him to recognize either truth or
beauty, and the lies of the boosters eventually become true
for him. In the background of the story the theme of lost
humanity and meaninglessness makes the young man's tragedy
only a part of a much greater tragedy: in the comment of
an actress that "’we live such damned lives, we do, and
we work in such a town! A dog is better off! And now they
are going to take booze away from us too!”53 and in the
reality behind the advertising slogan that proclaims milk
as ”'The health and freshness of a whole countryside...”54
as the bottles stand sour on window sills, Anderson portrays
a humanity made up of individuals who are tortured andlost,
unable to rescue themselves because there is no way open

for their escape.

 

531nm" 232. 5"This” 238.

201

The last pair of stories returns to the theme that
attempts to rebell or escape are futile. In the first,
”The Sad Horn Blowers,” a young man flees the dehumanizing
influences of a small town only to find himself condemned
in the city to a lifetime of drilling meaningless holes in
meaningless pieces of metal. All he can do is pick up his
trumpet and join others in a muted and futile gesture of

protest. In the second, ”The Man's Story” a similar situa

tion occurs. A married man runs off with another woman,
and they flee to the anonymity of a large city. She is
murdered; he is arrested but acquitted through another's
confession. Nevertheless he might better have been hanged:
"The man had come up out of the sea of doubt, had grasped
for a time the hand of the woman, and with her hand in his
had floated for a time upon the surface of life--but now
he felt himself again sinking down into the sea.”55 Again
Anderson pleads that we understand, but as narrator he
indicates that this is unlikely. Perhaps this is themd
of John Webster's rebellion.

”The Sad Horn Blowers” is interesting for another
reason: for the light that it sheds upon Anderson's chang-
ing view of the father-son relationship. When it was last
evident in his work in ”The Egg," the portrayal had changed

drastically from complete misunderstanding, as shown in

 

55lbid., 311.

202

Wipgy_McPhersonflg'§pp to recognition of the father as a
grotesque and as one who is deserving of compassion, per—
haps even because of his spiritual deformity. Here in
”The Sad Horn Blowers” Anderson moves beyond mere compassion
and portrays the son as intuitively learning to understand
his father and finally coming to identify his life with his
father's. This can only be possible, Anderson points out,
after the initial intimacy of the relationship has passed
and after the son has experienced the same sort of frus-
trating experiences that the father has gone through. In
his next work,‘§‘§pgpy Tellerfl§.§pppy, Anderson carries
this new sense of identification through to its logical
conclusion in his own life.

In the last story, ”An Ohio Pagan," Anderson returns
to the rural scene in a story that ends on a note of ad-
mittedly unjustified optimism, culminating a gradual re-
emergence of faith in man that had begun to assertitself
in "The Man Who Became a WOman.” After exposure to de-
humanizing influences of both city and village, the young
man protagonist of ”An Ohio Pagan” decides that he can find
,fulfillment through love and understanding only by looking
for it. This belief is not in the easy-answer manner of the
earlier’novels, however, because Anderson no longer believes
that such a search will actually find any meaning. Rather,
as he implies, the man may find satisfaction in the search
even though it never ends. As a result, in spite of the fact

203

that there may be no ultimste solution to the problem of
man’s isolation, he can find meaning in the fight against
it. Here he is returning in spirit to the ending of
Marching Mpg, when he points out that perhaps man's true
meaning lies not in attaining any eventual victory, but in
the spirit with which he goes down to defeat.

As Anderson concludes this volume he concludes the
search that he had started in Winesbur , M: the attempt
to determine the ultimate relationship between man and his
time by examining the effects of society on the individual.
In the ensuing attempt to come to know these effects through
the intuitive perception of the essence of each individual,
he has found that the individual is helpless as a result of
what society has done to him; he has come to realize the
complexity of the social structure that has isolated and
deformed man's spirit; and he has come to recognize the
futility of open rebellion against these social standards.
Despair, however, cannot be maintained indefinitely, and,
although at the end of Horses Egg Mpg he still sees no hope
for the ultimate liberation of the individual, he has begun
to regain his faith that somehow man can come to know and
understand himself and his fellows, and that through that
knowledge will come a worthwhile and satisfying existence.
The influence of society on the people whom he has examined
has been completely negative, and yet througth own‘ex-
perience he has seen that man can reach out and find some

understanding, as he had shown in the Winesburg stories.

204

Nevertheless, although this basic approach seems to be
sound and because he has learned that the act of rebellion
is meaningless unless it is carried through, his efforts
to resolve the problems of modern life through knowing
others have come to a dead end, and in order to continue
his search in spite of the almost overwhelming evidence
that it is useless, he must find a new direction. Because
he has been frustrated in his efforts to find meaning
through the lives of others and because he still believes
that the key to understanding lies in the experiences of
human life, he can only turn to the one other source avail-
able, his own life, and probe that for meaning by using his
basic tool of perception.

In this last volume of his period of social analysis
Anderson has maintained a high level of literary achieve-
ment, both in the individual stories and in the collection
as a whole. The stories are written in the Winesburg manner,
emphasizing revelation of character through moments of in-
tense experience and depending for their effect upon this
revelation rather than through any significant plot struc-
ture. Also he has continued the_stylistic technique of the
earthy Midwestern story-teller with thesame generally good
effects. As a result, two of the stories, "I'm a Fool,"
and ”The Man Who Became A Wbman” are among his best, and
others, including ”A.Chicago Hamlet” and ”The Sad Horn

Blowers," are very good. None is a complete failure,

205

although some, like ”Unused,” would profit from condensation
or rewriting. In combining the stories into a collection
Anderson has used both structural and thematic means to
unify the diverse subject matter into a statement of his.
view of the lot of modern man. As the shifts from city to
country and back again indicate, Anderson has learned that
grotesques do not result from values peculiar to either,

but to our society as a whole, and his particular instances
of deformed humanity are projected into a universal image

as a result.

During this period, Anderson's work and his personal
life combined to show his efforts to move beyond the initial
discoveries of the Chicago Liberation and to come to know
the meaning of the human eXperience in his time. In his
personal life he learned that rebellion for the sake of re-
bellion results in a dreadful and dishonest conformity unless”
it is used as a point of departure rather than for an end in
eitself. As a result he moved out of the area of the Chicago
Liberation, he rejected the New York modernists as neurotics,
and he sought out a deeper and more mutually fulfilling re-
lationship than was possible in his "enlightened" marriage
with Tennessee Mitchell. The direction that his life would
take was uncertain to him at this point, but he knew that
he had to move on, that these factors had served their pur-
pose in permitting him to find a means toward personal as

well as artistic fulfillment, but to carry that means through

206

to an end he had to put them behind him. As he left Reno
early in 1924 with his divorce granted, he married Elizabeth
Prall in the hope of finding a mutually fulfilling personal
relationship, and he began a period of wandering across the
American countryside hoping that he might find a place and

a people who respected and understood the values that ante-
dated materialism and individualism run wild.

In his work at this point he had already started in a
new direction.in order to find meaning where apparently
there was nothing but chaos and despair. When he left Reno
he carried with him the'partially-completed manuscript that
was to start him probing into his own life and experience.
In this manuscript he started to look for an intuitive bridge
between appearance and reality so that he might find behind
experience the values that would free the individual from
the intensity of his isolation, cure his spiritual ill-
nesses, and permit him to take his place in a new, humanized
society. As he started in this new direction his letters
from Reno began to show an air of cheerfulness,‘but'behind
this cheerfulness is a deeper and more insistent note cf
anxiety that betrays the despair that he was trying to
overcome because failure to continue his search would'be
to surrender to the grotesqueness he was trying to cure.
To Roger Sergel he wrote:

To tell the truth, I‘ve found a lot of men.

Don't ask too much...The staleness exists, the
flatness. Often.enough it gets into a man and

207

infects him like a disease, It is a disease,

fa32§f§5 crawling fear of what? Life, I

Yet he still felt instinctively that there was a
secret to the meaning of the American existence if he
could find it. After considering the idea of trying to
find it through writing a life of Abraham Linooln,57 who
together with Mark Twain epitomized the Midwestern exper-
ience to him, he decided to finish _A _S_t_o_1:y mg Stor ,
realizing that his was the only life that he could hope to
understand completely. As he left Reno he wrote, "I feel
like a man recovering from a long illness, every day more

ready for work now,"58 and with his new wife he started

out in a new literary as well as personal search.

56Letters, 120.

57The fragments of this life later appeared in.Pau1
Rosenfeld‘s The Sherwood Anderson Reader (Boston, 1947)
as ”Father Abraham: A.Lincoln Fragment", 530-602,

58Letters, 125.

CHAPTER VI
INTROSPECTION AND IDENTIFICATION

During the mid-twenties Anderson's published work
was almost entirely autobiographical or semi-autobiograph-
ical, with the single major exception of _D_a_1_'_k_ Laughter.

Two of these works, _A_ m Teller'p m and 23.3: _A_
Midwest Childhood, are direct attempts to evaluate and
interpret his own eXperience against the backdrop of the
Midwestern experience in the years between the end of the
Civil War and the early 1920's; Sherwood Anders_gp_'p_ N232-
p993 examines his eXperiences as writer in America; and
132,13 Laugpter is the fictionalized account of his latest
rebellion, this time against the stagnation of the modern
liberation movements that had failed to carry through their
mission to eventual liberation of the human spirit but had
remained on the level of rebellion as novelty, as inconc-
clasm, and as neurotic excess.

The years between 1923 and 1927 were a time of un-
certainty, searching, and aimlessness for Anderson in spite
of the facts that his new marriage promised to be successful
and that he was writing almost constantly, finishing one
manuscript and turning immediately to the next. Shortly

after his divorce was granted, when Tennessee had finally

208

209

withdrawn her legal objections,1 he and Elizabeth were
married, and they lived in Berkeley, California, for a

few months before going on to New Orleans, where they in-
tended to live permanently. Finances were tight, as usual;
Horses gpg Mpg was not selling; and Anderson began to feel
the pressures that would take him from his writing again,
but he was determined to do anything rather than go back

to advertising. .

Meanwhile, completely absorbed in his new projects
and in.his new marriage, he was determined to put off such
necessities as long as he could and to continue trying to
determine the meaning of the Midwestern eXperience as he
knew it. Basic to this understanding was his growing need
to rid himself of the uncertainties about the direction his
life had taken ever since he had left Elyria, especially
about the writing career that had almost forced itself up-
on him, about the value of his work, and about his presump-
tion in thinking that he could do it justice. During his
stay in Berkeley this problem was very much on his mind,
and he wrote, "...I am too unsure of myself. I'm rather
afraid...The one thing I detest, because it makes me feel
detestable, is preaching or being wise man or seer. The

whole secret lies in.the fact that it is also my problem

1Howe, 143, points out that Tennessee finally con-
sented after Ferdinand Schevill made her admit that she,
as a "modern" woman, could hardly hold a man to a marriage
he didn't want.

210

to be 'just the man, walking along, seeing, smelling.'"2
Later he wrote, ”The desire to write surges up, but often
you are too tired or distracted with other things to quite
follow out your impulses,"3 but nevertheless he forced him-
self to write, and shortly after his return to New Orleans
he finished 5 _S_‘_t_c_>_r_y Teller'g My. Nevertheless, he was
quite uncertain about it because he was afraid that it
diant accomplish what he had thought it would. As he
wrote to his brother Karl,
Don't know about A m Teller'p M,

whether I got what I was after or not. I

didn't try to set down obvious facts, only

tried to get the spirit of something.4

The spirit of the something that he was trying to get
through this work and those that followed it during the
succeeding three years was insight into the meaning of his
own life as it had been shaped by experience. The means
that he chose to find this insight was the same technique
that he had employed in the Winesburg stories, in the
sketches in'gpgp'flhgpg, and in many of the stories in the

two more recent collections. This was the technique of
intuitively examining the meaning underlying the appearance
both of people and events. In such a technique, factual
appearance is unimportant, except as the roughest sort of

guide, and in practice it must be ignored in order to

 

2Letters, 124. 3Ibid., 126. ‘Ibid., 129.

211

penetrate beyand it to the essence of things. The re-
'sulting work cannot be considered a reliable guide to
factual material, but as the earlier results showed him,
it is capable of revealing the essence of individuality
and of the relationships between man and man, man and cir-
cumstances, and man and ideas. This approach had worked
for him in.fiction and he had no reason to suppose that
it would not work in dealing with his own life. Of course
he could not anticipate the reactions of critics who assert
that he turned to himself because he had nothing else to
say and then castigate him because the result ”...is neither
record nor fiction, loyal neither to fact nor to imagina-
tion."5

If Anderson had been attempting to write either fic-
tion or autobiography such criticism would be valid, but,
as Anderson points out in the book, ”I have perhaps lied
now and then...but have not lied about the essence..."6
because, he explains, ”In the world of fancy...no man is
ugly. Man is ugly in fact only."7 If one is to prObe
beneath the surface of life and to find beauty and truth,
he has no choice but to ignore the facts, as he had learned

in the Winesburg stories; he must explore life with the

 

5Howe , 143 .

6Sherwood Anderson,;g,8togy Tellerflg Story (New York,
1924), 383,

 

7Ibid., 78.

212

receptive intuition of a romantic poet rather than with
the sharply factual mind of a Journalist who reserves his
attention.for the surface trivialities. As a result,Ԥ
§tggy Tellerflg.§tggy uses fact as a point of departure
from whence intuitive perception takes over rather than
as an end in itself. The result, of course, does not fit
conveniently into either of the conventional categories of
fact or fiction, and consequently Anderson’s purpose in
writing the book is lost in the resulting confusion.
Basically, Anderson is attempting to solve one pro-
blem in the book: the matter of his own identity. Thus
far his life had been a series of rejections on every level
of his life, ranging from his initial rejection of the
small town to his rejection of the city, from his rejection
of business ethics to rejection of the ethics of the libera-
tion, and from rejection of his father to rejection of the
women whom he had married in the hope of finding love. At
this stage of his life he was forty-eight years old, but
he had found no stability in life because each of the things
he had experienced proved to be disappointing and frustrating. .
Now he was starting to look back, to re-examine these eXper-
iences in the light of what had come after, and to try to
determine whether or not these rejections were sound, and
if they were not, to try to find out what he had missed that
had made him what he was. Then, perhaps, he could find out

whether he was a mere idler and player with words and was

213

fooling himself as he had heard almost from the beginning
of his writing career, or whether he was really on the
' path that, if he followed it long and diligently enough,
would lead him to understanding of the human experience.
The protagonist of "An.0hio Pagan" had set out in renewed
confidence to find this understanding in spite of all the
evidence he had amassed that pointed out the essential
meaninglessness of life, and now Anderson was attempting
to find out whether that confidence was justified.
Anderson's re-interpretation of the facts of his
earlier lifesre apparent from the first page. The harsh-
ness of childhood that he had portrayed in all of his novels
except.ggny Marriages is gone, and in its place is a life
that was hard but not heartless and poor but not poverty-
stricken. Appearance, he decides almost at once, had been
deceiving him for a long time, and he had been failing to
see the warmth of intimate family relations that more than
compensated for the lack of material things. The father
brought romance into the life of his family; the mother
brought love and comfort; the brothers provided strength
and confidence; and the legendary grandmother brought the
security of earthy mystery. In such a portrayal, the con-
trast with that presented in fliggy,McPhersonfg.§2g is ob-
vious. The facts are substantially the same, but behind
them Anderson has begun to see a.meaningful human rela-

tionship that he had unwittingly rejected.

214

The most striking change in this portrayal of the
early years is the change Anderson has wrought in the
portrayal of his father, Irwin Anderson. As seen through
the wee. of Sam McPherson he was a failure, a windbag, and
a symbol of personal inadequacy, even though Anderson's
own sympathy had shown through to make Windy at times a
ludicrous rather than a vicious characterization. The re-
versal of his interpretation is not sudden, as his recog-
nition of the plight of the craftsman in Eggg'flhitg, the
sympathetic portrayal of the father as grotesque in ”The
Egg," and the intuitive understanding of the father in ”The
Sad Horn Blowers" show, but it is a new view that Anderson
has been fumbling for, perhaps unconsciously, since he found
himself following Irwin in rejecting the practical life for
the impractical and the world of facts for the world of
dreams. The new portrayal here gives Anderson a sense of
identity and of purpose as he draws Irwin Anderson as the
displaced person of the 1890's just as he had begun to
regard himself as unable to find a permanent place fer him-
self in the 1920's. The image of Irwin Anderson is thus
presented as the archetype of the artist in America:

My father lived in a land and in a time when

what one later begins to understand a little as

the artist in man could not by any possibility

be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were

to be expressed in building railroads and fac-

tories, in boring gas wells, stringing tele-

graph poles. There was room for no other dream
and since father could not do any of these

215

things he was an outlaw in his community. The

community tolerated him. His own sons toler-

ated him.8

This is a portrayal of Irwin Anderson that departs
considerably from the facts, as William Sutton's study
shows. Irwin was not regarded as an outlaw in Clyde, but
he was liked and at times rose to the level of community
leader in.spite of his improvidence and his occasional
bout with the bottle. However, it is an image that Ander-
son, sensing himself to be a double outlaw, not only for
his rejection of materialism but more importantly for the
misunderstanding that both Winesburg, thg and yin-y M-
gggg'met, could accept. It was at this point that he had
asked himself ”Had I a sex obsession? WasI a goner?”9
and in recOgnizing the misunderstanding that Irwin met be-
cause of his rejection of the standards of his time he saw
himself as the same sort of victim, true to himself andib
his view of life, and misunderstood as a result.

The identification of himself with his father goes
beyond this sort of rationalization, however; it gives hum
a sense of identification with a tradition much older than
the societies that could not understand either him or his
father, and at the same time it reinfbrces his concept of
craftsmanship in art by pointing out that it, like the old
hand crafts, has been handed down from father to son. This

 

81bid., 26. 91bid., 377.

216

tradition is that of the storyteller, the man who belongs
to no group or society because his calling transcends such
appearances and deals with the essence of life. This
identification provides the rationale that he needed at
this time so that he could continue the writing that had

a become the center of his existence.

As a result of this changed view of his father, Ander»
son has withdrawn the first of his rejections, and he moves
on to examine others and to examine values that he had pre-
viously accepted unquestioningly. In rambling, formless
style as the impressions occur to him he recounts the im-
pact of pride of workmanship, of the new philosophy of
success, of new, cheap, impressive construction. In each
of the incidents Anderson questions himself: did he recog-
nize each for what it was, or did he accept the appearance
of things as indicative of their intrinsic worth? He has
no answers, and so he passes on to the greater decisions
and acceptances of his life.

Ybuthful adventuring along the racetrack circuit, the
early laboring years in Chicago, and the Spanish-American
War experience are treated in detail. In the first, he
deduces, the real desire for material success was implanted
in him through a Judge Turner who was for him the same sort
of father image that John Telfer was for Sam McPherson; at
this point he made his first rejection, of simple and
natural values, as he went to Chicago to follow the glitter

 

ll

 

 

217

of materialistic success. The early Chicago years saw
him as confused; on one hand he saw hardness, brutality,
and poverty; on the other he was still blinded by the
dream of success. The myth Turner had taught him as true
was already beginning to break down as he saw the images
he had carried from Clyde destroyed in the flesh around
him: the strong mother love of the town needed reinforcing
by gin in the cities; the respected merchant-wise man be-
came a single-minded exploiter. The only values that had
any permanency, he found at this point, were those of warm
human relationships, and these were threatened by his life
in the factory. His ensuing dilemma was temporarily solved
by the Spanish-American War.

The Army eXperience, as he looks back, was one of
the most misleading in his life. Here he had mistaken the
appearance of unity among men for a depth of comradeship
that did not exist. It was a dream that he tried to bring
into existence in MarchingIflgg, he concludes, as he asks
himself ”Is all feeling of comradeship, of brotherhood
between many men, a little absurd?"lo His attempts to
break the barriers among men and his failures have taught
him by this time that he had indeed confused appearance
with reality, and here he is still confused by his discovery.

 

lolbid. , 285.

218

His rejection of industrial and commercial success
and his decision to become a writer are treated in detail,
including the dramatic exit from the paint factory that
has been incorporated into the Anderson myth. Discrepan-
cies with the actual circumstances abound, but they are
immaterial. Here Anderson is trying to determine the
motives, conscious or unconscious, that brought about his
action, and he is trying to find the meaning of his literary
career. They are identical, he decides; industrialism is
dehumanizing, while he is driven by the desire to humanize.
Just as industrialism had destroyed craftsmanship while it
was replacing individuality with standardization, he sees
his job as restoring craftsmanship in his own chosen field
and at the same time probing beneath the standardized sur-
face of human life in order to find its hidden but real
meaning. Even though he re-visits Elyria anonymously he
finds that he not only has no regrets, but that his re-
jection is validated by his recognition of the meaningless-
ness of his former life.

The last major rejection that he reviews is his
determination to ignore the equally destructive forces of
both the stagnated liberation movement and the standards
of the literary market place. At this point his discourage-
ment, his frustrations, and his persistent doubts about his
abilities are most in evidence but, as he recognizes him-

self as his father's son, he recognizes that he can do

219

nothing else. Here he records his decision to look South
in the almost optimistic hope that he can find a place that
will permit him to do his work honestly. As the decision
is made, illogical though he recognizes that it is, he
becomes like the young man in ”An Ohio Pagan," confident
that somewhere he can find meaning, and the book ends on
a note of faith in his work if not in his abilities. In
the background there is nostalgia but there are no regrets.
In‘A‘Stggy,Tellerf§.§tggy Anderson has accomplished
one important thing from the points of view both of his
personal life and his writing career: he has fused the two
into a mutually justifying and mutually supporting whole.
Through his identification of himself with the re-inter—
preted image of his father he has rationalized away the
concept of himself as "a goner,” as one who had become a
degenerate, at the same time that he has replaced the memory
of Irwin as a drunkard and braggart with the image of a
romantic storyteller who found meaning in the imagination
rather than in the surface standards of society. At the
same time he has justified the instability of his own
family life by excusing his father because he had followed
a higher calling; he has verified his rejection of material-
istic standards through the same means; and he has emerged
with a new sense of mission fer himself in his role as
storyteller. The ”spirit of something" that he was trying
to get was the spirit that he needed to carry himself through

220

the doubt and despair that he was plagued with in both.writ-
ing and personal life. His immediate plunging into‘Qggk
Laughter and the furious pace with which he wrote it indi-
cate that he had succeeded, at least for a time.

From Anderson's point of view _A_ .5322! Teller'g Slog-1
was a success because it did allow him to findthis sense
of personal identity by leading him ”...toward understanding
of whatever may be beautiful and fine in life, my own life
and other lives,"11 but he did not expect it to sell because
it was such a personal thing. In this he was right, but as
in the past he did not anticipate the criticism that would
be leveled at it for its looseness of structure and for its
content.

The form of the book is a direct result of the intuitive
approach that Anderson had employed toward his subject matter.
The intuitional approach depends for its effectiveness upon
bursts of illumination or of insight into the meaning be-
hind appearance. It is not capable of sustaining a pro-
longed narrative of any kind although, as its practicioners
from the romantic posts to Anderson show,it is most effec-
tive in short works, either of poetry or prose. In the
Winesburg and later stories as well as in the sketches inter-

spersed in Poor White Anderson's use of it was justified.

llLetters, 105.

221

Here, however, it results in a loose, unconnected narrative
uneven in execution. As a result, when the work is con-
sidered as a series of parts, individual passages, especi-
ally those on the machine age, on the return to Elyria,
and on the thoughts of America inspired by the cathedral
at Chartres, are among his best works. On the other hand,
when considered as a unified whole, the book‘s unsatis-
factory passages detract greatly from its overall effec-
tiveness. -
Structurally and stylistically the book is Anderson's ‘xl
nearest approach to the oral story-telling tradition as it
was practiced in the Midwest and undoubtedly by his father,
and this, too, accounts for the looseness of the narrative.
Rambling, digressive, and disorganized on the surface as it
pauses to explore a side issue to to explain a bit of seem-
, ingly irrelevant background, it incorporates the qualities
of the rural gossip or "talker,” and then suddenly the reader
is aware that these seeming irrelevancies are pertinent, that
the narrative has been moving forward, and that a point has
been made. 'While this technique is often.exasperating to
the sophisticated reader, nevertheless it is in keeping
with the tradition with which Anderson has identified'him-
self and which has value'beyond its legitimate ancestry.
As Maxwell Geismar has pointed out, "...this local gossip
has its own flavor, wit, and specifically human'bearing
that may be a national antidote to publicity slogans as

222

well as continental salons.”12 The slickness and super-
ficiality common to both were part of what he had rejected,
and that his rejection was more than mere words is born out
by his return to this old and authentic tradition.

A My Teller'_s_ S3331 had solved, at lessttempor-
arily, Anderson's doubts concerning the worth of what he
was doing and the honesty of his decisions, but it did not
solve the most immediately pressing of his personal pro-
blems: the need for money. His children were growing, and
he could not ignore his obligation to them; he had resolved
to live permanently in New Orleans, which was not a cheap
city in which to live; and he had a new wife to support.

' At the same time he was determined not to go back to ad-
vertising, so he compromised by working as rapidly as he
could on‘Qggk Laughter as long as he had money, meanwhile
making arrangements to go on the lecture circuit during
the whater months of 1925. However, in spite of his finan-
cial difficulties he found the fall of 192A to be one of
the happiest, most satisfying times of his life after
having purged himself of his doubts. To Paul Rosenfeld
he wrote,

The new book [fiark Laughte§7 flows like a

real river, so far. It should dance, a little

crazily--bags of corn.in the moonlight, niggers,

a man and woman at the center of it. I‘m at it

hard anyway, and the days have joy in them.

I've an idea there are fields ahead in which.I
haven' 1; tried walking berm-9.13

 

12Geismar, 254. 13Letters, 130.

223

As the time came for him to go on the lecture tour,
shortly after he had finished Dark Laughter, he became de-
pressed again: "I'm utterly gloomy myself, always am when
I have published a book...Also I am gloomy about the new
novel. It is en a shelf in my workshop.”14 What was
really bothering him, however, was the reception that his
recent works had had among the general public and his fear
of facing these same people from the lecture platform:

I am known as a dangerous man...I think Many

Marriages did it. The whole mood is one out of

wh ch I have quite passed now, but the public

does not know that. It seems to them that when

they come toward me I do something terrible...

That in reality is the reason why people are

afraid to engage me as lecturer. They fear I

will piss against the leg of the man who is

Introducing me or bring on the stage a lady and

do her violence there to promote the higher

life...I can't make out whether they want me

to do some such violence or are really afraid

I will.15

Even more than these problems, however, he was
beginning to feel again the old Question that had bothered
him before he had finished h Story Teller'g Story: after
his rejections, what then? After he had rationalized the
question away he had been able to_devote himself to sus-
tained work, but now, at loose ends while waiting for the
tour to begin, he fretted about it again: ”What is really
puzzling is that I feel that the publication.of h Stohy
Tellerflg Story marked a period for me. I have been.so much

a naked man.walking through the streets after all. ‘Now I

 

1#Ibid.. 133. 15Ib1d.

224

begin to want clothes again."16 Already he was ready to
return to the probing of his past, hoping that he could
find direction as well as identity there,and he began to
make notes for 23;: ‘5 Midwest Childhood.

Meanwhile, he went on tour, spending the months of
January and February, 1925, on the circuit, and as much
as he enjoyed travelling about again, seeing new places
and meeting new people, he was depressed, he felt that
lecturing was somehow dishonest, and he was eager to be at
the new book. Nevertheless, the tour was successful, and
in Thh Modern Writer,l7 which contains the lecture he de-
livered, he attempts to define the rationale behind his
writing career as he had evolved it in £.§£2£I Tellerflg
‘égggy. The writer, he points out, is caught in the same
'dilemma that all of America has been in for years: the neces-
.sity of making a choice between commercial success, measured
in terms of cheapness and wide sales appeal, and honest
craftsmanship that is often not only unrewarded but un-
recognized. The former, he says, is dishonest, while the
latter is made up of ”...workmen whose materials are human
lives..."18 The modern writer, then, is one who is attempt-

ing to ”...get back into his own hands some control over the

 

16Ib1de 9 133'134e

17Sherwood Anderson, ghg Modern writer (San Francisco,
1925), the first of his small limited editions, this one of
1,000 copies.

18Ibid., 29.

225

tools of and materials of his craft.”19 All the writer

can want or expect if he is honest is the freedom to do

his work, and he should not ask for more. ”The real re-
ward I fancy lies just in the work itself, nowhere else.

If you cannot get it there, you will not get it at all...
You are undertaking a task that can never be finished.

The longest life will be too short to ever really get you
anywhere near what you want."20 That Anderson believed what
he said is shown by the fact that almost all<f his spare
time was being devoted toIzhg.

In March the ordeal was over, and from New Orleans
he could write "Am working again, the pen flying. I lec-
tured, I saw people...Made a little money and often an
ass of myself."21 Preparingihghh La ter for publication
(2222,Lahghter was suggested as a title, but he rejected
it as ”too pretentious”) and working at.22£ absorbed his
time and energies; he had signed a five-year contract with
Horace Liveright that would take care of his financial
worries, and in restless moments he and Elizabeth would
take short trips through the South. In looking for a place
to finish.ghg in peace, he discovered the Virginia.mountains.

 

19Ib1d., 31-32. 2°Ibid., 44.

21Letters, 135-136.

226

In the fall of 1925, while he was finishing 222:
.hghh Lahghter was published. In it Anderson had tried
to convey ”The neuroticism, the hurry and self-conscious-
ness of modern life, and back of it the easy, strange
laughter of the blacks,"22 and although he does convey
this contrast, actually the novel is the story of the last
of his rejections which, in effect, was the rejection of
rejection. Anderson again employs the materials of his
own life, in this case his disenchantment with the shallow-
nessand meaninglessness of relations among people in the
supposedly emancipated circles of Chicago and New York, in-
cluding the kind of marriage such a movement produces; he
reiterates the rejection of middle-class values that he
had proclaimed in hghy Marriages and re-affirmed in é.§£2£l
Tellerflg‘ghghy; and he begins a symbolic return to the un-
spoiled primitive life that he had accepted.in highggy
Teller{§‘§hghy and was to bring to its culmination in 22!-
At the same time he was accepting it in his own life through
his attraction to the French Quarter in New Orleans until he
made his final move to the mountains of southwestern Virginia.

Anderson sets the tone f0?.22££ Lahghter in a prelimi-
nary sketch dene in the Winesburg manner. Here, in the
portrait of a minor character, Sponge Martin, a primitive

craftsman who refuses to surrender either his sense of a job

 

22Ibid., 142.

227

well done or his own individuality to the new age, he shows
how life might be lived in simple, uncomplicated, and honest
directness. Martin appears and reappears in the novel as

the symbol of the uncorrupted wise man, apparently an out-
cast, but in reality a free man, just as do the negroes,

. but the novel from this point centers around Bruce Dudly,
formerly John Stockton of Chicago, who has not only rejected
conventional standards of values as had John Webster, but
who has gone beyond that rebellion and has rejected rebellion
as an end in itself. The novel traces his attempts to find
fulfillment and liberation afterthe last of these rebellions.

The two most important incidents that led Dudly through
renunciation of the liberation movement are told in a series
of skillfully handled flashbacks that show the Liberation
movement as shallow, superficial, and insincere, and that
show his movement backward in American history in an effort
to find a place and a people that had not been corrupted
either by materialism or by middle-class standards of be-
havior. In both cases the implications of Anderson's life
since he had written Winesbugg, ghhg are made clear as
Dudly is shown to be another of the Andersonian heroes.

In Chicago Dudly had been an advertising man, a member
of the Liberation group, and a partner in a childless modern
marriage that was nothing more than a convenient but legal
arrangement. All three of these were meaningless to Dudly,
the first because it offended his growing sense of crafts-

228

manship and the integrity of words; the second because it
is so busy being free that it has no time to go beyond the
act and do something with its freedom; and the third be-
cause the relationship stops on the surface and has no
depth. In one of the subtlest passages Anderson was ever
to write, he shows the shallowness of this whole phase of
Dudly's and therefore his life.

The surface picture of the Liberation movement makes

it appear to be an earnest attempt to find a meaningful
life, and the keynote of the movement is self-eXpression
.at all costs. This surface presentation is largely respone
sible for the novel's initial reception as a laudation of
the modernist movement as well as for much of the more re-
cent accusations of naivete, but both ignore two facts of
his treatment of the movement. In the first place, the
portrayal is entirely superficial, and he makes no effort
to penetrate the surface as he does in his customary intui-
tive approach; and more importantly, secondly, he uses a
powerful illustration that makes clear the impotence of
the movement.

Dudly's wife is a writer; a vivid scene on a street
corner strikes her as significant, and she makes it into a
story. But she is unable to finish.it; although she has
caught the surface of the scene, she is unable to capture
its essence because she can't understand it, and the story

remains meaningless. The bitter undercurrent is as strong

229

here as it is in the short stories Anderson wrote during
his last Chicago years as he punctuates his indictment
with an acid, "For the sake of art, eh?"23

The rest of the novel is concerned with Dudly's
search for fulfillment. Leaving the sterility of his marri-
age, the movement, and his job behind him, he heads down the
Illinois River toward the Mississippi, New Orleans, and a
renewed sense of identification with America, convinced
”...that he, in common with almost all American men, had
hot out of touch with things--stones lying in fields, the
fields themselves, houses, trees, rivers, factory walls,
tools, women's bodies..."24

lFrom this point the novel is the story of that search.
In New Orleans he is fascinated by the foreign air and by
the negroes, but he is unable to know them, and so he re-
turns anonymously to the Midwestern town where he was born,
gets a job in a factory working beside Sponge Martin, has
an affair with the factory owner's wife, and then, when
she becomes pregnant, runs off with her, presumably to ful-
fillment, although in the background her negro servants
laugh mockingly and wisely as they recognize the futility
of the attempt. The two of them have made the only choice

23Sherwood Anderson, Dark Lahghter (New Ybrk, 1925),
50.

241mm. , 62.

 

v.

230

possible between sterility and fulfillment, but their
elepement remains in the end a gesture of rebellion rather
than an arrival at freedom. It is merely another point on

a long road that, as Anderson indicated,inu2hg’M0dern Writer,
has no real end, either in fact or in fancy.

Like all of his earlier novels,‘2§g§ Laughter is a
story of rebellion and rejection, and like the others, ex-
cept Many Marria es, the ending is optimistic but inconclu-
sive, again.pointing out Anderson's major weakness in the
novel form. The novel has no real ending, and the impres-
sion remains that there is a much larger and more signifi-
cant story to follow. In spite of the fact that both re-
bellions, Dudly's rebellion against the superficialities
of liberation and the manufacturer's wife's rejection of
her sterile and shallow marriage, were conscious and de-
liberate; in spite of their acceptance of each other as
human beings; and in spite of Dudly's confidence that same-
how he would find a meaningful work, the laugh of the negro
servants is as mocking as the factory whistles that accom-
panied Hugh McVey's decision 1n.§ggg‘flhitg. There is no
assurance that they will be successful; like Anderson's
decision to turn South at the end of _A_ £112.11 W's m
their rejection is deliberate and optimistic in spite of
the doubts surrounding its eventual success. Rejection is
the beginning of the road to understanding and fulfillment,
and integrity demands that one follow that road regardless

231

of its outcome. At this point Anderson can.see no other
meaning for man's life.

Structurally the novel is very much like its prede-
cessors, especially Many Marriages and.§ggg'!hitg, in that
Anderson devotes a substantial portion of the middle section
to a long background digression that, for all its interest,
is actually irrelevant. In his efforts to incorporate as
much of the atmosphere of the times into the novel, his
description of the shallowness and decadence of post-World
War I international society becomes more than a mere contrast
with the forceful, primitive, and meaninful life, and it be-
comes more than motivation for the girl to enter into a
marriage devoid of feeling in her efforts to escape it. It
becomes instead a long distraction from the main purpose of
the novel in spite of Anderson's attempts to tie it in
structurally through flashbacks; and it does not broaden
the base of his objections to the superficiality of society
because it is too remote from the Midwestern sterility that
he castigates. As a result it leads the reader into irrele-
vant and misleading byways.

Stylistically the novel is a departure from the
solidity of Eggg‘flhitg, and it follows the disjointed techni-
que of’flggz Marriages to the point where it loses the spontan-
sity of Anderson's Midwestern idiom and syntax and seems con-
trived. Although Maxwell Geismar refers to this difficulty

as a "...shiny machine-made veneer...[3ve§7 ...Anderson's

232

honest western grain,"25 actually this description is not
accurate. No machine would be tolerated that produced 2
such unevenness. Occasionally, however, the Midwestern
Anderson takes command over the unhappy stylistic eXperi-
mentations, as in the Sponge Martin sketch, and.one wishes
he would have continued in that vein.

In this novel Anderson was strongly under the influ-
ence of James Joyce, as he noted before its publication:
”I think as a matter of prose eXperiment you will sense
what Mr. Joyce was driving at when you read‘Qggk Laughter
...I very frankly took his experiment as a starting place
for the prose rhythm of the book."26 What he failed to
realize was that his own earlier eXperimentation had led
him to a style that had become his own, and that the imita-
tion of Joyce was actually hindering rather than advancing
his career as a prose stylist. The result is unsatisfactory
and obvious imitation rather than solid originality.

It is unfortunate that Ernest Hemingway chose to
parody this novel in‘ghg Torrents 2; Spring. Not only was
the result inept, but it indicates that Hemingway, like so
many of the other creative writers of the period,27 had
accepted the Anderson stereotype as the celebrator of the

 

25Geismar, 255. 26Letters, 148.

27See, for example, Theodore Drieser's comments on
Man Marrigges in his Letters, Rebert H. Elias, ed.
T—JPhidadelphia, 1959), HT, 22.

233

Liberation. Instead, as Geismar comments, 'Ostensibly a
portrait of the emancipated modern ego,‘Qgg§ Lagghter is
actually a portrait of the inadequate‘modernego,"28 and
as a result Hemingway's burlesque is actually a parody of
what Anderson had himself ridiculed. It is difficult, howb
ever, net to make this mistake because of the broken form
of the novel. More serious, however, from Hemingway's
point of view, is the stylistic parody that in effect is

a burlesque of his own in 1132 _Sgn _A_l_s_9_ _I-_Z_i_s_e_s_.

Other misinterpretations have resulted from the in-
terpretation of the novel in the light of the Anderson
stereotype. Oscar Cargill, for example, sees Anderson's
characters as intellectuals and the novel as essentially a
story of contrast between the loves of the intellectuals
Dudly and Aline and the unintellectual negroes.29 Rather,
in the very passages that Cargill uses to support this con-
tention, notably in the passage about Gauguin, it is evi-
dent that his characters have rejected the psuedointellec-
tuals that represent the only intellectual life they know,
and are trying to find a new freedom uncomplicated by the
jargon and the superficialities that Cargill points out.
Again, the mistake is an easy one to make because of the

novel‘s structural defects, but it is an unnecessary one. '

 

28Geismar, 256.

29Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America.(New‘York,
1948), 329.

234

The most serious accusation that can be leveled
against Anderson in this novel is thoughtlessness;30 just
as that is the basic trouble with Many Marria es, here
again it results in.fbrmlessness and.in his inability
to carry rebellion through to whatever follows the act.
That there is something next is clearly implied, but what-
ever it is, it is cloaked in nothing more than a vague hope
and overtones of failure. Anderson has made clear his con-
viction that rebellion is not enough, but he is unable to
go beyond that point either to the fulfillment that he seeks
for his people or to the inevitable tragedy that was so evi-
dent in the short stories.

_-

3on is not, however, the same sort of thoughtless-
ness that Irving Howe has seen fit to make much of in
Anderson's handling of Jewish characters. Howe complains
that all of them are nameless and are characterized as
Jews rather than human beings. He feels that this is
not due to Anderson's prejudice but the unforgivably
thoughtless acceptance of a folk stereotype of the Jew as
alien and therefore unknowable. That this is a folk stereo-
type is obvious, but objecting to it in Anderson's work is
the same sort of misguided liberalism that removed Huckle-
berry Finn from public libraries and schools. Just Mark
Twain did not characterize Jim as he did thoughtlessly,
neither did Anderson approach his Jewish characters thought-
lessly. Rather each knew what he was doing; each was work-
ing in a tradition that accepted the stereotype, and honesty
demanded that they portray it. In dealing with the problems
and peculiarities of his Midwestern rural people among whom
the Jew is considered unknowable and alien because of cul-
tural and religious differences, Anderson had no choice
but to proceed accordingly. At the same time he pointed
out that the attitude was one of the many barriers that
would have to be destroyed before men could know each other.

235

This ultimate vagueness is not unexpected, however;
rather, it parallels Anderson's own position. He had turned
South at the end of _A: S3231 Teller'_s_ M9 not because he
knew he would find any answers there but because it was a
continuation of his rejection. Bruce Dudly is in the same
situation, and Anderson's thoughtlessness lies in his in-
ability thus far to find meaning anywhere after the act of
rejection. That he did not follow this novel with other
fictional works but instead followed it with two more vol-
umes of what for want of a better word must be called auto-
biography is indicative of his pressing need for answers to
the questions raised in his fiction and his continued in-
ability to find them outside of himself and his own world.

22;; Laughter has two unique values at this stage of
his literary career. The first is, of course, the rejection
of rejection, the recognition that the modernist rebellion .
against puritanism, materialism, and conformity is not an
answer but a beginning; the second lies in Bruce Dudly's
anonymous return to the small town in which he was born,
hoping that in accepting the uncomplicated and unsophisti-
cated life of the town he may find fulfillment. He did
not anticipate the inroads of materialism that Anderson
knew were there, of course, and so he did not find what
he sought. At this point, working on 321;: 5 Midwest M-
'hggg, Anderson was seeking a vicarious return that he could

not achieve to fact.

236

.2222 Lahghter was Anderson's only work to approach
the level of a best seller, paying him more than 88,000
during 1925. This, combined with several thousand dollars
from the serial rights to 122. in Thg m’h hghg Com anion,
removed at least temporarily the financial difficulties that
continued to plague him and, in addition, provided the oppor-
tunity for the last and most significant of his moves. In
the hills of Southwestern Virginia, which he and Elizabeth
had visited while he was working on.ghh, he discovered
Troutdale, Virginia, where

The mountain people are sweet.. No books,

little false education, real humbleness. It

does so beat talking to pretentious half-

artists. We may try to acquire a few acres

and a cabin...Everyone wants you to come in,

ziggtfgf moonshine, to eat, to spend the

With the money from his successes he was able to
afford more than a new acres and a cabin; although he was
committed to a late fall lecture tour, he made arrangements
to buy Ripshin Farm near Troutdale and to start construction
not only of a cabin but of a big stone house. Meanwhile,
back in.New Orleans he put the final revisions of 22!
aside long enough to collect essays, sketches, and bits
of memoirs from the past few years and to put them together
under the title of Sherwood Anderson'h_Notebook, which was

published.in the spring of 1926. It was published in the

31Letters, 145.

237

midst of a personal crisis: his brother Earl, who had
lived with him for a time in Elyria, and who, Anderson
comments in the Memoirs had much to do with his decision

to become a writer, turned up in New'York after thirteen
years of silence, partially paralyzed, poor, and a failure
in his attempts to become an artist. Karl was caring for
him, but Sherwood, conscious of his debt to Earl and fond
of him as a brother, was eager to help. At the same time
he was ashamed of his success in the light of Earl's failure.
Nevertheless, he insisted that Earl come to the farm to re-
cuperate and to make it his home.

At this time, too, Anderson's son John was determined
to be an artist, and he was trying to temper his own sym-
pathy with the boy's ambition with a preper but belated
sense of parental caution and prudence. When Sherwood
Anderson'thotebook was published he was so busy with
family and farm that he gave it almost no attention. He
hoped, he commented, that it had "...a healthy, nice tone,"32
but the book as published can hardly be described that way.
Instead it is the record of the years of frustration,
despair, and rejection from the time of Poor White until
he began to regain his equilibrium with the publication of
h .S_t_hr_'y Teller'h §_t_o_1_~y. In the Notebook Anderson records
what he thinks is permanent in his thinking and his life in

 

32Letters, 151.

238

the years of maturity following Winesburg, ghhg, not as
formal autobiography, but as observations, impressions,
and experiences loosely linked chronologically.

Its value is more than a convenient ”...collection
of magazine pieces written several years earlier,”3 as
Irving Howe dismisses it, because it provides insight into
Anderson's thinking and his attitudes during the period of
wandering after he rejected the liberation, and it shows
the development of the style that he used unsuccessfully
in 2225 Laughter. Also, in spite of the air of bitterness
and pessimism that permeates the later pieces, it shows the
turning point that led him to Troutdale, Virginia, accept-
ing it as a counterpart of the simple, honest ways of late
nineteenth century Clyde, Ohio.

The collection is an apparently artless and naive
accumulation that could be just what it ostensibly is, a
notebook or daybook containing the distilled wit and wis-
dom of the author. Actually, however, it does not repre-
sent Anderson as he was when it was published; instead it
shows him at his low point during which the stories of
frustration and despair were written. Here one sees the
state of mind behind the stories, a state that sees no
hope for modern man as a group, as an individual, or as

Sherwood Anderson, unappreciated and impoverished writer.

 

BSHOWB , 208 e

239

There is no shadow of the coming best seller, of the gener-
ally successful lecture tours, or of the security of place
that the farm was to provide.

Anderson's state of mind concerning the hopelessness
of the lot of modern man and of himself in his efforts to
come to some sort of understanding of his dilemma are best
shown in three of the essays, ”I'll Say We've Done Well,"
”Notes on Standardization," and "When the Writer Talks."

The first is a look at his native state of Ohio in an
article written in 1922, and in it Anderson is at his bitter-
est. Instead of realizing its potential as a place where
the individual could find a meaningful life, Ohio has be-
come as dirty a place as it is possible to find. His irony
in the essay is so heavy that it becomes denunciation as he
comments that Ohio cities "...can put themselves forward as
being as ugly, as noisy, as dirty, and as careless...as any
American cities anywhere.”34 But his denunciation is not
mere muckraking; it is bitter regret at what has happened:
Have you a city that smells worse than Akron,
that is a worse junkheap of ugliness than YOungs-
town, that is more smugly self-satisfied than

Cleveland, or that has missed as unbelievably

great an opportunity to be one of the lovely

cities of the world as has the city of Cincinatti?

...I claim we Ohio men have taken as lovely a land

as ever lay outdoors and that we have, in our cities

and towns, put the old stamp of ourselves on it for
keeps.35

 

34Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Andersonig’Notebook
(New'York, 1926). 90.

351bid., 90-91.

240

But it wasn’t easy, Anderson comments; ”First we had to lick
the post out of our hearts and then we had to lick nature
herself, but we did it."36 Now,
...A man in Ohio can lead a decent life. He

can get up in the morning and go through a street

where all the houses are nicely blacked up with

coal soot, and into a factory where all he has to

do all day long is to drill a hole in a piece of

iron...Nowadays all you have to do, if you live

in an up-to-date Ohio town is make, say, twenty-

three million holes in pieces of iron, all just

alike, in a lifetime. Isn't that fine?3

”Notes on Standardization,” written in 1921, continues
in this vein, examining the mass-produced culture of America
until he sees no way out of the dirt around him, and he cries
out, "Are our lives worth living? Is it living at all to
Spend all of our best years in helping to build cities
larger...make more dirt and noise and indulge in an ever-
increasingly louder talk of progress?"38 Nevertheless,
more in hope than in conviction he continues on a lower
pitch: ”Or is there a quieter, more leisurely and alto-
gether more charming way of life we might begin to live,
here in America?”39 To this there is no answer in the essay.

"When the writer Talks" brings Anderson's personal
problems into the picture. Not only is lecturing a neces-
sary evil that takes him away from the writing he should be

doing, but it poses new problems. Basically he feels that

35lpig., 91. 3T;2;g.. 99. 381bid., 147. 391bid.

241

it is silly and degrading, and at the same time that it
stimulateshim, raising the old question of his values and
the dichotomy of standards that he finds in himself. On
one hand, he says, "'This lecturing business is so excit-
ing and interesting. I love it.'” On the other, he feels
that "'This lecturing business is so terrible. It makes
me feel so cheap.”40

"King Coal,” like ”Notes on Standardization,” passes
beyond regret and bitterness and points out the increasing
need that Anderson feels for a sense of place and of per-
manence in his life, the same need that led him to buy the
farm in Virginia: ”If a man lives in a street in a modern
industrial town can he love that street? If a man does
not love the little patch of ground on which his own house
may stand can he in any sense love the street, the city,
the state, the country of which it is a part?"41 The need
for an answer to this problem leads him to search for a
"forgotten spot where progress is unknown."42

Besides this record of his despair, his frustration,
and his growing need to identify himself with a place that
will case his growing despair, the book contains liberal‘
samples of his newly-acquired.hhhh Lahghter style that

suffer in comparison with the unpretentious prose of these

 

401mm, 177. 411bid., 215-216. 42Ibid., 219.

242

essays. In the intermittent "Notes Out of a Man's Life,"
the product of odd moments during and after the writing of
.2223 La hter, Anderson employs the jerky, disjointed,
impressionistic prose style that hinders and distorts the
clear expression of his thought. Nevertheless, here, too,
the bitterness grows softer toward the end, as his personal
problems become eased and Ripshin farm becomes closer to
reality as a place in which he can find refuge from the
harshness of America. In the last of these Anderson con-
cludes with regrets at the little that he understands and
with the hope that some day he may know more; with puzzle-
ment at the recurrence of the same old prOblems; and with

a final reiteration of his faith in craftsmanship as a way
of life. The final sketch, of a man who has rediscovered
craftsmanship, is the reiteration of Anderson's belief that
although the end of his search may be beyond his abilities
to grasp, nevertheless he can find a measure of satisfac~
tion and fulfillment in the means.

Until after the economic collapse of 1930b31 Sherwood
Anderson'§_Notebook remains as the last real expression of
his doubts about his own place in modern America and, most
importantly, his inability to find a means for putting into
effect the only solutions he saw for the problems of modern
society. The return to pride and satisfaction in work; to
compassion, love, and understanding for other human beings;

and to a state of innocence even if it might be brutal at

243 '

times were fine theories, but in a modern, sophisticated
society he knew that talking about them was futile, even
among those whom he had earlier regarded as fellow revo-
lutionaries. Although these were the only possible solu-
tions that he could see, he realized that his talking, like
that of his father, could only be misinterpreted or ignored
among a people who were madly pursuing economic and material-
istic success.

The end of this book, like that of h'ghghy Tellerflh
ghghy, points toward a period of withdrawal from the public
scene and a concentrated attempt to find meaning in life
through the means that he had been suggesting for so long
and that he had redefined in both of these autobiographical
memoirs. At this point the world is not for him, and Ripshin
Farm becomes the focal point of his need to reject it so
that among a simple, honest people he can put his principles
into practice. One more task remains for him: to see 22;:
‘5 Midwest Childhood into print as the final step before he
completes his withdrawal at a time when he feels that ”A
man plows on and then dies. God knows about it all..
Rubbish piled up. The real flaw always eluding a man. Then
when it is almost hopeless, a bit comes...These times of
discouragement come like a disease. A man.never escapes.
Sometimes I think I can feel them in the air, from North,
Soz'fith7, East, west."43

43Letters, 160.

244

Early in the summer of 1926 he and Elizabeth.moved
into the completed cabin on the farm near Troutdale, ”...
planning to make it our permanent home.”#4 Here he had
found the way of life that he depicted in Tar and that he
had thought was gone,

...a way of life that is outside theione of

most America just now. The machine has not

penetrated deeply into the hills. Hand weaving.

is still being done. Grain is still cut with a

cradle. You may see oxen on the hill roads and

in the fields, and when a man dies his neighbors

come to his house and budld his coffin in the

yard before his door...The hills have, however,

their own fools, their beautiful women, their

liars, the r over-sensitive and their easily-

hurt ones.

Tar: .hiMidwest Childhood is the product of this new
sense of discovery. It is the record not merely of Ander-
son's own childhood but of an America still possessed of
much of the innocence, exuberance, wonder, and unconscious
brutality of all childhood. written primarily in the hills
during the late summer and fall of 1925, it is neither auto-
biography nor fiction although it is close to being a novel,
but it is an attempt to fuse past and present and to compile
a portrait of a world in which it would be possible for man
to practice the virtues that would lead him to fulfillment;
it is the temporary world of the 1870's and 1880's in rural
Ohio made permanent as a refuge for his dreams; and at the

same time it is his recognition that such a place still

 

“Ibis” 152. 45Memoirs, 389-390.

245

exists in the hill country that has been overlooked at
least for a time by the exploiting forces of material pro-
gress.

In‘ghh Anderson is not attempting to provide either
a factual or an ideal or idealized portrait of an America
that he would like to see return in fact. Rather, again
using the intuitive approach to understanding the essence
underlying the surface phenomena of life, he is trying to
recapture the spirit of that time in its code of inarticu-
lated values and its sense of the worth of the human indi-
vidual as they are shown in its actions. Kindnesses shown
to an insignificant boy or a pot of soup carried to a sick
neighbor are thus made more meaningful than all the millions
of dollars poured into impersonal, standardized, and dehuman-
ized charity.

On the jacket of the book he comments that "It is,
of course, autobiographical, as such a book would be bound
to be, but it is not written as an autobiography." It is,
in fact as well as in intent, another of the combinations
of fact and fiction that have exasperated category-minded
- critics. In the forword he states that his purpose in writ-
ing the book is his belief that ”Like every other man and
woman.in the world I had always thought the story of my
own childhood would be an.absorbingly interesting one,”46

 

46Sherwood Anderson, Tar: ‘h Midwest Childhood (New

 

1‘

 

 

 

246

but as the foreword goes on to point out, his real reason
is not quite that simple. If it were, the story as it had
been told in 31;.th McPherson'h _Sgh and _A_ m Tellér'h
§£2£I might have been sufficient. But neither of them
satisfied him because in.hoth of these he had missed the
”spirit of something” that he had been trying to catch.

Now he was starting over, reinterpreting again, in the hope
that this time he might grasp it. His neglect of the facts
he dismisses with artful but insincere naivete as a writer's
fancy, but as both his letters and later Memoirs show, he
was deadly serious in writing the book.

The reason for returning to his childhood background
in 223 in order to recapture this spirit of innocence is
made clear by the cyclical structure of his life as he
showed it in _A_ m Teller'h _S_’§._9_I_'y. The first part of
his life he saw as essentially good and meaningful in spite
of the occasional brutal innocence of the age; the early
Chicago years were essentially meaningless in spite of
his growing awareness of the intrinsic worth of the indi-
vidual; the Army period was good; the following commercial
years bad, the early writing years good, and the later
"literary" years bad. He had rejected both the commer-
cial and the "literary” years as meaningless; the early
writing years were a time of personal discovery impossible
to recapture; he had tried to find and utilize the meaning

of his Spanish-American war experience in.Marching Men and

247

learned that he had been deceived. The only place in his
experience that remained for him in which to find personal
and social meaning was the Clyde, Ohio, of his childhood
and youth.

The outline of the book Shows an almost complete
identification with the autobiographical materials Anderson
had used in both H.122! McPhersoh'g fig; and A My Teller'h
Sighy, but the presentation of these facts is a complete
repudiation of the interpretation put on them in the former
and an amplification of that in the latter. The most im-
portant new material that Anderson introduces is a dream
of childhood and youth that had largely faded away under
the impact of materialism in adulthood, and the revelation
of this dream points out what he is looking for in writing
the book. It is of a town that is perfect in its pastoral
simplicity, and it is a town that he acknowledges could not
possibly exist in fact. Whether the dream was actually a
dream of his youth or whether Anderson imagined its existence
as a frustratededult doesn't matter. What does is his seek-
ing for a refuge where, in his imagaination, he could with-
draw from the world. It is this dream that he has identi-
fied with the hills of southwestern Virginia.

The portrayals of both the father and the mother
carry on from the point at which he left them in.é.§22£l
Tellerflhlghhhy. In the case of the father Anderson has
completed the portrayal as that of the mythological free

248

adventurer-craftsmanpstoryteller, and in the process he
makes the earlier tentative identification complete. The
father tells the tales of his real or imaginacy adventures;
he goes steadily downhill from draftsman to employee to
wanderer; and he is just as disreputable as WindwacPherson,
but here Anderson takes pride in the disreputableness, which
he identifies with his own: like his father, "Tar became
a story teller but, if you will notice, it is the shift-
1ess roving fellows who tell tales. Few tellers of tales
are good citizens. They only pretend to be.“47

The concept of the mother has changed from the earlier
portrayals too. No longer is she the patient, suffering,
pitiable woman of;flhhgy McPhersonfglhgh. Still inarticu-
late, remote, and mysterious, she is no longer tortured by
her life as the wife of a wastrel, but her evolution, begun
in Winesbur , 9222.When she sought fulfillment vicariously,
is now carried through to completion, and she emerges as a
woman fulfilled in the mysterious role of motherhood, which
combines compassion, service, and intuitive understanding.
As a result, she is no longer a person; instead she becomes
the symbol of female strength and innate wisdom upon which
Anderson will later build his hopes in Perhaps hhhgh.

Mcre important than these changing views of the parent
images, however, are two aspects of the book that point out
the "spirit of something" that Anderson is looking for.

471bid., 11.

249

The first of these is Tar’s introduction to what can be
called the awareness of and reverence for life. In a
manner that is gradual, natural, and accepted in such an
environment, Tar comes to realize that as diverse as the
many facets of life are, nevertheless they are part of a
whole. The earliest sounds of rural life stirring in the
morning, the feel of a horse's tongue on his hand, and the
attempt to emulate animals by eating the grass are the
earliest manifestations of life to him. Later, these im-
pressions are joined by other discoveries: the potential
threat of a newborn child; the sheer enjoyment of spring
grass after the winter; and more vividly the sting of a
bee and the increasing desire to know the wonder of a girl's
body. This long but unified process becomes epitomizedin
the sketch of the old woman who dies alone in the woods,
the best passage in the book. However, as Anderson points
out, it is only the adult who can look back and see the
meaning of both the growth of this awareness and of the
incident in the woods that symbolized it,48 and then only
after he has realized the meaninglessness of the things
that had blurred the image for a'time.

. Equally important to his adult recognition of this
childhood value is his reconsidered view of the town itself,

 

48Shortly after Tar was published Anderson expanded
the incident into "Death in the weeds."

250

a view that is the most nostalgic thing Anderson had yet
written. Here are the fertile countryside and the close-
ness of the town to it; the give and take of small town
raillery; early morning at the racetrack; the quiet of a
drive through the country; and the excitement of Saturday
night on.Main Street. But all this is more background for
the recognition of the values that Tar had missed. It was
a society in which.the individual had dignity because he
was permitted to have it. Although Tar recognized this
instinctively, the imagined stigma attached to his father,
who was really well liked, prevented him from becoming a
full participant in the town life, and in imagined self
defense he became a hustler as he accepted other values.

Yet Anderson's portrait of the town is not one-sided.
He "...is no necromancer,"49 as Maxwell Geismar points out.
Even in retrospect Anderson can see it:

Boys, Tar's own age, had secret vices. Some

of the boys at the swimming hole did things,

said things. When men grow older they grow

sentimental about the old swimming hole. They

remember only the pleasant things that happened.

There is a trick of the mind that makes you for-

get the unpleasant. It's just as well. If you

could see life 8%ear and straight maybe you
could not live.

Evil did exist, along with the good, but it was human
evil stemming from the brutality of innocence rather than

the inhumanity of materialism, although Tar did not realize

 

49Geismar, 261. 59222: 233-234-

 

v.

 

 

251

it then. Instead, he accepted the values of the new
materialism as good, and with that he hustled into matur-
ity, leaving innocence behind. Only much later, as Ander-
son points out, could he realize his loss.

As Anderson's attempt to capture the spirit of the
values that he wanted America to accept in place of material
standards and of the values that he sought for himself, the
book is successful, but many factors combine to prevent its
success as a work of literary art. The first of these is
the repetitious nature of the material that he uses, especi-
ally since it was written so soon after'hwghhhy Tellerflh
§§g_y. Critics have complained that Anderson had exhausted
his creative imagaination at this point and was reduced to
using the same material over, and in spite of the importance
that this book has as a literary interpretation of what
Anderson was seeking in his own life, the criticism is
justified. Even the new materials, the new interpretations,
and the interesting attempts to reconstruct a world view
as seen through the eyes of a child are not enough to over-
come the repetitiousness of the book.

Structurally the book is one of Anderson's best
executed works; the jarring structural weaknesses of his
Previous book-length manuscripts have been overcome, and
the narrative is unified, but stylistic difficulties that
he should have been able to remove occur frequently to mar

the work. Not only are they the obvious ones, such as

252

awkward sentences and grammatical weaknesses, but they are
more serious ones, such as the attempt to return to his
Winesburg style as a child would write it. As a result

the effect of the solid Midwestern style that he had evolved
is lost, and a weak imitation of it predominates until it
becomes too evident that he is an adult trying consciously
to relive his childhood.

In spite of these two weaknesses the book is an im-
portant one in Anderson's career, both because it is his
lmost eloquent denial of the generalitiesthat have surrounded
his work and because it is a book that he had to write at
this point. It certainly refutes the persistent myths that
he was a naturalist or that he was revolting from the village,
and it points out his true attitudes toward both life and
the town. More importantly, however, it comes as close to
being a positive statement of Anderson's personal values as
it was possible for him to make up to this point. Here he
shows the pattern of behavior that he feels would make
possible meaningful relations among people; he shows that
things are not important; and he shows that simple ways
and simple standards can go far toward removing the barriers
that isolate men from each other. It is a statement of be-
lief that he could not make directly; he could only make it
under the guise of fiction.

The values that he found in his imaginative return
to the Clyde, Ohio, of the late nineteenth century are the

253

values that he sought to surround himself with in Trout-
dale, Virginia. As he concluded this long period of intro-
spection he had achieved identity and vidication and then,
finally, a sense of place in a world increasingly hostile
to his ideals. Vindication came easiest; he had been con-
vinced of the validity of his rejections and of the direction
of his life almost from the beginning, and what he needed
was reassurance in the face of the failures, the misinter-
pretations, the many difficulties, and the qualms of con-
science about the way he had neglected his wives, his chil-
dren, and his brother. It was a simple matter, but it was
necessary because his view of the world had become so bitter,
as the two volumes of short stories indicate, that he could
not go on without it.

Personal identification was a bit harder, although
it too became increasingly necessary because of his intensi-
fied sense of aloneness as he faced a hostile and misunder-
standing world. Yet the way was prepared for him to ident-
ify himself with his father as early as Winesbur , thh, and
in each of the following father pictures he came closer
until it became inevitable that he see himself as another
Irwin. Irwin was a craftsman; so was he. Irwin had rejected
material success; so had he. Both of them were misunder-
stood wanders who followed a calling that justified their
neglect of others; both of them were seekers after a higher

fulfillment through their imaginations. In rehabilitating

254

the memory of his father, Anderson found an image of him-
self that removed the stigma of failure and eliminated his
despair so that he could go on writing and living with him-
self.

Finding a sense of place that would permit him to
live with his values and to ignore a world that, whether
materialistic or liberated, sneered at them to the point
where he was ashamed to confess them was more difficult.
The series of moves from Chicago to New Yerk to New Orleans
were manifestations of that search, and finally he had to
acknowledge that such a place existed only in the past.

As he started 2h; as a statement of beliefs, his trip to
Virginia was more than mere coincidence or a search for a
quiet and cool place in which to work; it was a continua-
tion of his restlessness that resulted from his need. That
he would fuse the two in his mind, seeing the values that
he accepted put into practice, was almost inevitable, and
finishing 222 and buying the farms were acts that had the
same meaning. At that time he felt that he really had
found what he had been looking for, and in his personal
life at least he began to feel secure.

This sense of security was not to last, however, and
already factors were combining to destroy it. Economic
chaos was not far off and it would shake even the Virginia
hills; his marriage had reached a peak of success and would

soon begin to decline; and most important of all, the long

255

period of introspection had done damage to his literary
reputation that was just beginning to be felt. He felt
that the period was successful from his point of view; he
had achieved satisfaction and had even made some money,
but he was aware that the material of the period was not
as good as it could be, and he was having difficulty with
a new novel, ghhhgt Whittingham, which he subsequently
abandoned after numerous false starts.

As understandable as it is when viewed in the light
of the personal and ideological crisis that Anderson was
undergoing during the period, nevertheless his creative
abilities had declined considerably during this period.
They had not disappeared by any means, as the many ex-
cellent passages in all four of these book and as "Death
In the Woods,” written just afterIghh show, but the major
works of the period are marred by stylistic difficulties
that could have been eliminated easily were it not for his
increased tendency toward experimentation that was actually
imitation and by the sheer haste with which he wrote all of
the books. The repetitiousness of the material adds to
indications of a decline, and 2233 Laughter, his only
major attempt at fiction is, in the final analysis, a weak
novel rather than the powerful portrayal of postwar life
and values that it was intended to be. During the period

Anderson had become a seeker rather than a craftsman, and

256

the resulting work shows the difference when compared to
the Winesbur :.§22£.E22222 and short story achievements.

There can be little doubt of the fact that personal
problems, ideological doubts, and lack of understanding of
the nature of his own talents were at fault in this decline.
Nevertheless at this time they were apparently resolved, and
as though in celebration he turned to an old work, h:hgg
Testament that, when revised, would indicate that one period
in.his life had ended and that another had begun. But mak-
ing it a piece of work that would signify what he wanted it
to was hard work, and as he commented, "There is a lot to
say, but I am too tired to write."51 In spite of his new
sense of identification and his discovery of a place in which
he could live, he had found no ultimate answers, and he was
beginning to realize that he never would. With the comment
that "It helps being down here. I'm done with cities.,.I
wanted to bury myself in the field and come up green,"52 he
was ready to use Ripshin Farm as the refuge for which it was
intended. A quick trip to EurOpe to arrange forfbreign
publication of‘h‘hhhhy Teller'h_Stor , the Notebook, and
Winesburg made him more determined; on his return he wrote

I wentto Paris and feund myself close to
famous. That's just plain sickening. God knows,

I h0pe you escape it. gt's sheer nonsense with-
out a spark of meaning. 3

 

Slésiiszs. 168. 5?;pid.. 171. 53Ibid., 170.

257

In the effort to forget this sort of thing he buried
himself in the countryside, he sought to gather his family
and his old friends around him, and he worked sporadically
at h;hhg Testament. Now that his period of introspection
was over he found himself as deSpairing as he had been
before. Now, however, he was trying to regain strength and
faith through the hills and the people in them rather than
through himself. At this point Anderson was tired, and it
would take a long time for him to regain the confidence
that he almost had within his grasp. He had rationalized
his problems and he had returned physically to an older way
of life, but he still had to learn to live it.

CHAPTER VII
THE TOWN SMAN

During the late twenties and early thirties Anderson
withdrew almost entirely both from literary work and from
the literary scene. Even after the long period of intro-
spection that had resulted in his discovery of a place with
which he could identify himself and an acknowledgment of
his self-imposed role as storyteller and outcast, he was
full of despair. For the most part the trouble was with
his work. Not only had his literary reputation and output
declined, but he was afraid that his career was over in
spite of the fact that he knew ”Death in the Woods” was one
of his best stories. During the few weeks in Paris in Janu-
ary, 1927, he was at his low point:

Everything I have written seems dead stuff...

My fancy tosses and jumps constantly. I work

on a novel for a week, then throw it away. I

write a start story. It seems nothing...I can
see hothing I am doing as really worth present-

ing.
At the same time, however, his old illogical optimism

reasserted itself:

Well, I'm too old a bird to think it is all
necessarily final for me. I have waded through
other long swamps...I may right myself like an
old ship.

1Letters, 165.
"""" 258

259

We'll be back in America early in March...

God knows, I hope I will be something less

rudderless by then.2

Even after his return the despair continued: "Long
days nothing to do. 'Write, man.‘ But what shall I write?
I am sitting on a hill in the country or walking in the
streets of a town. I am in despair, such despair..."3
This was to continue until he made the decisions that his
withdrawal demanded. These decisions would have effects
on his career and marriage that he could have anticipated,
but nevertheless they had to be made. The first was primar-
ily acknowledgment of a fact rather than a conscious choice:
"...now I am in somewhat of a better temper, having come to
a resolution. I have decided that, for my soul's good, I
have got to give up the notion of living by writing. This
idea that one must produce constantly, or starve, is terribly
.detrimental to any sort of freedom of approach.‘ All the time
I am driven by this demon of necessity...I want what writing
I do to be incidental, a part of my life, not a profession."4

This decision demanded another: he had to find a means
by which to earn a living. He considered returning to the
city to find a job but rejected the idea when the opportunity

came to buy the two weekly newspapers, one Republican and

one Democratic, in nearby Marion. Financing the purchase

 

2Ibid. 31bid., 177. 4Ihid., 174-175.

 

 

 

 

__

 

 

260

was difficult but a loan from a wealthy admirer, Burton
Emmet, made it possible. In late 1927 he became a country
editor, a role that absorbed his energies and made it
possible for him ”...to get back into closer association
with all kinds of people in their everyday lives."5 This,
too, was something he had been needing if the sense of
place he had found was to be anything more than geographic.
The effect of these decisions upon his marriage was
to come later; meanwhile he celebrated them in.h;h§g‘gghhh-
hghh, which he finally published in 1927. Alternated with
the notes of celebration are shadows of the fears that had
been plaguing him, but these fears recur only intermittently,
and the overall tone of the book is one of joy and release.
2:52! Testament has much in common with.h;h-American Chants
in that it, like the earlier collection of free verse and
verse prose, marks the end of one phase of Anderson's life
and the beginning of another. Equally importantly, it bears
the same relationship to Anderson's prose style of the late
1920's that hhg-American Chants bore to his style in the
late teens and early twenties. The volume also provides
further evidence that Anderson was not a poet, although
there is no indication that he ever pretended to be one.
It is not a book that has much interest oreppeal other than
to Anderson specialists, although occasional flashes of

 

51bid., 175.

‘Il'l‘l‘lll‘ (ul‘
i \ll"

 

 

 

 

 

261

insight and frequent pleasing phrases make it often re-
warding.

In this collection as in the earlier, Anderson was
taking advantage of a freedom that neither fiction, auto-
biographical memoir, nor conventional verse could provide
so that he could give expression to a new sense of dis-
covery. Because he did not fully understand his feelings
and was still uncertain of them he could not have expressed
them in any other way, although as he became accustomed to
them he used them in shorter pieces 13Ȥ21l2.22!22' and in
3133 American Country £325. In effect, in h N_e_!_r Testament
he shows the rural midwesterner kicking up his heels in the
pasture as he feels the freshness of a new point of view
and a new direction in his life.

Occasional shadows of the doubts, fears, and frustra-
tions recur in the book just as shadows of brutality and_
harshness drift into 2229 but essentially it is, like 2229
a new affirmation of what Anderson had long believed, and
it is full acceptance of his role as townsman. It is not
a serious effort at poetry; it is Anderson indulging him-
self, looking on the remote past fondly and the immediate
past fearfully; acknowledging the harshness of the present;
and looking forward to an honest future.

Early in the book, in "Testament” he sets the tone
of optimism and affirmation that predominates in the verse.

He is, he says, writing a testament "...of one who would be

262

a priest;"6

yet he can only ”...stumble into the pathway
of truth...I smell the footsteps of truth but I do not
walk in the footsteps."7 He knows what he is seeking, he
points out, but he does not know how to find it except
through his old intuitive empathy: ”It is when you are
torn from your moorings and drift like a rudderless ship
that I am able to come near to you."8 This is the role
that he had been living for most of his life, and in see-
ing it in himself, he knows and understands it in others.

Nevertheless, in ”Song Number Three" he reverts to
celebrating his role as story teller:

My throat has not yet been choked

by the dust of cities.

My mind is a Kansas tumble-weed. It

rolls and bounces and skips on wide

prairies. The wind tosses it about.

It scatters its seed.

My spirit has not yet been imprisoned

by walls of stone and iron.9

In "Song Number Four” this tone of freedom continues
as he fuses his Optimism, his new sense of freedom, and his
role as story teller:

Listen, little lost one, I am testifying to

you as I creep along the face of a wall.

I am making a testament as I gather

stones and lay them along the face of
8. W811 e 10

 

6Sherwood Anderson, h New Testament (New York, 1927),
12.

7Ibid., 12-13. 81bid.. 16-17. 91bid., 17.

1°Ibid., 22.

263

These excerpts indicate the dominating theme of the
volume: Anderson has accepted his role as storyteller re-
luctantly and yet confidently because now having found his
way through the worst periods of despair and having found
what seems to him to be meaning, he feels qualified to
point out the way to others. In spite of intermittent
occasional flashes of the old fear, as in ”The Man With the
Trumpet," included from The Triumph.h; the Egg, in other
verses such as "Hunger" he sees life as promising, and in
"Death" he finds a new sense of identity with the world
and with others. In "Ambition," however, Anderson returns
to the quandary he had been in:

I am one who has walked out of a tall building
into the streets of a city and over plains into

a forest that fringes a river. My notion is one

of escape. I can no longer bear the life led in

my father's house. I am a child and cannot es-

cape out of my childhood. There is a door

through which I cannot enter, a wall I cannot

climb. The idea of esiape long ago attacked

the seat of my reason. 1

From this rejection, wandering, and searching has
come a new discovery:

I have remade the land of my fathers.

I have come out of my house to remake

the land.

I have made a flatplace with the palms

of my hands.12

This is the discovery that Anderson focuses on in

most of the volume: the sense of identity and the sense

111bid., 38. 121bid., 39.

264

of place that he had sought in reinterpreting his past.
The shorter pieces like "A Persistent Lover” and "The
Visit in the Morning” reaffirm his old faith in the mutu-
ally regenerating influences of people reaching out to
understand the essence of each other, and he revels in
the resulting strength.

”The Dumb Man" from Th3 Triumph.g;‘hh§thg is an-
other of the jarring backward glances included to temper
the optimism of these shorter pieces, but following this
he again reaffirms his strength. Only once, however, does
he look away from his role and his new sense of place to
the outside world. In this verse, "A YOung Jew," he points
out the sheer horror that destroys so much of human indi-
viduality. This mood continues in "The Story Teller,” but
again he turns to optimism in the verses that conclude the
volume, asserting his belief that "...something lovely may
happen."13

These last verses comprise a solid note of affirma-
tion of his beliefs. Three are especially significant.
"Young‘Man Filled With Power” is a strange verse for
Anderson at this stage of his life, yet it represents the
youthful strength that surged over him as he learnedto
understand his past. ”Two Glad.Men" carries this strength

into sheer joy; while the final verse, "A Man and Two WOmen

 

-13Ibid., 82.

265

Facing the Sea" represents Anderson's paradoxical position
at the time. The imponderables, fears, and misunderstand-
ings of the past have been overcome, but their shadows are
still with him, and although he has found the direction to
be followed in the future he is impatient at his slowness
in following it.
1 As a creative work, A Egg Testament is unimportant in
the Anderson canon. It is not a volume of verse that can
stand on its own merits; it does not convey emotions that
can be vicariously experienced; and it is repetitious and
awkward. It is, however, important for two reasons. In
the first place, it shows that Anderson has decided to
abandon the Joycean eXperimental prose and structural
patterns that had marred Dark Laughter and has decided to
return to the Midwestern idioms and rhythms that he had used
1n.22£ as well as in the earlier and more successful works.
More important, however, is the second reason: its position
at this stage of Anderson's career, Just as hhhyAmerican
Chants had marked an earlier decision and beginning, so
does this volume. The earlier collection showed the emer-
gence of Anderson the conscious literary artist, while this
volume marks the emergence of Anderson the townsman.
Anderson had not expected the book to be successful,
and he was not surprised at its critical reception. "...
the Testament has brought down a furor on my head," he

wrote. "My death as a writer is being tolled up and down

266

the literary press. The crapehangers have all been busy.
Well, I have been thrown that before. It does not matter
much.”1#

What did matter was his new role as townsman-editor
of Marion, Virginia.‘ The purchase of the papers had given
him a new interest and a new purpose in life, both of which
promised stability and the chance to become accustomed to
his acceptance of the way of life he had rejected long be-
fore and then rediscovered. During the next few years,
withdrawn from the literary scene, free of the pressures
to write constantly, and with the opportunity to live close
to the lives of other people and to learn to understand
them, his frustrations, his deSpair, and his fears that
he could no longer write began to ease, and he was person-
ally a happy man who was doing something he enjoyed. Sum-
ming up his new life, he wrote:

Now I am getting up in the morning at six

and am at my desk at eight. I do everything.

A man wants a little handbill got up for the

sale of steers. I write it for him. An old

mossback farmer comes in and spends an hour

trying to get me to knock off 25 cents on the

subscription price of his paper. I enjoy it

all and in the moments I catch am writ§ng

again. That is what a man lives for.1

During the fall and winter of 1927 and all of 1928
the papers and the life of the town occupied almost all

of Andersonis attention and energy. The Smyth County News

 

14Letters, 175-176. 151bid., 180.

267

was Republican, and the Marion Democrat was Democratic.

Never having been seriously interested in politics, Anderson
farmed out the political editorials to local politicians, but
the life of the town as recorded and interpreted in the papers
was his exclusive province. Creative work became for him an
avocation, a secondary interest that he could indulge himself
in, and he became almost entirely the country editor. All the
time, however, he was a journalist with integrity, with respect
for the innate intelligence of his readers, and with a great
depth of feeling for words, for colloquial rhythms and idioms.
Town projects and needs, ranging from the jail to the band,
"Henry Mencken Park," and a lending library were sponsored by
his editorial columns. News items were mixtures of fact, con-
jecture, and imagination that had nothing to do with textbook
maxims of journalism but everything to do with the meaning of
life in the town and the surrounding hill country.

In the papers Anderson was trying to do the kind of
writing that he felt the mass media could produce if they
wanted to. He was not trying to sell anything, and so he
put the techniques of advertising behind him and.wrote for
his readers rather than down to them. At the same time he
tried ”...to give the fancy a little play, create in.the
town imaginary figures of people and situations."16 The
result was country journalism that showed the possibilities

 

___r

l6mid. , 183 .

268

inherent in a.medium that was free of the pressures imposed
by the profit motive, and it was successful. Not only did
Anderson get "...150 new subscribers in six weeks without
asking anyone,"17 but many of the articles were reprinted

in national magazines, especially'yhhhhy‘hhgh, and in early
1929 he was able to combine much of the best of the material
into a book, £23.23 my

During these months of devotion to the papers Ander-
son had entered into the life of the town as completely as
he had when he was ”Jobby” Anderson thirty-five years before.
He solicited advertisements from the merchants, attended
meetings of clubs and the town council, covered trials,
became a member of the "town senate" in the local drugstore,
and spent a good deal of time gossiping on the steps of the
courthouse. All the time he was storing up information, im-
pressions, and ideas as he had in Clyde, gathering raw mater-
ial for his future work, and he was drawing closer to the
townspeople. At the same time, however, he knew that he
could never fully belong, and the basic isolation.of authors
became an occasional topic for editorials.

Creative work would not really come through during
these months, however, and Anderson worried about it.
Several things were started and then abruptly abandoned.
At the same time he was concerned about the attitude that

 

17Ibid. , 181.

269

some of his friends were taking toward his new career. In
one testy letter he wrote, ”Of course, the idea that there
is anything condescending about my working here is all non-
sense. I am not after anything for others as much as I am
after it for myself, and when I can get nothing more out of
it here, I shall leave.”18 What is was that he was hoping
to find he still didn't know, but he felt himself ”...getting
weaned away from myself to again begin thinking of other lives
and loving and enjoying people again.”19
During these months, however, his third marriage be-'
gan to deteriorate, and early in 1929 he and Elizabeth
separated, she going to California and he giving way to an
Aincreased restlessness as his inability to do sustained
creative work continued. Like his previous marriages, this
one had been based upon a time of his life that had passed,
and Anderson the country editor and former prominent writer
was not the man Elizabeth had married five years before. In
Virginia Elizabeth had tried to maintain the pretense that
his creative impulse was still strong, she saw the farm as
a literary salon, and she was out of sympathy with his inp
creased frustration at his inability to do any sustained
writing. When the break between them came it was the result

of Anderson’s rationalization that he must cut loose again

 

18Ib1dc ’ 193-1940 lglbide 3 1940

270

and leave the farm and the papers if he was to write.
Suddenly they had become a burden rather than a source of
pleasure.

‘With the break between them permanent he left the
papers in charge of his son Rebert and began to wander--to
Florida, to Chicago, and then back to the farm. His prime
interest in these months was in putting together'hghhg Towns!
and in concentrating on creative work, the only tangible re-
sults of which were the short pieces Nearer‘hhg‘ghhgg‘hgghh,
51.193 19g 3.01.12. _thh .N_c_>_y_e_l_, and The American County {£13. In
these works Anderson combines solid affirmation of the endur-
ing quality of life in the American small town with indica-
tions of the tentative direction in which his restlessness
is going to lead him as he begins again to look at the world.
The first of these works, Eflllfl Townsl, was published in the
fall of 1929.

Eéllfl Towns! takes up where he had left off in‘h Egg
Testament, because it, too, is a testament of his belief in
his rediscovery of a way of life and a scale of personal
values that he thought had disappeared. Essentially it
records that rediscovery, in fact rather than fancy; it
reaffirms his belief in the intrinsic worth of uncomplicated
human life; and it provides the key to the problems that had
prevented sustained and worthwhile creative work during the
previous two years.

The rediscovery is shown in the relationship between

271

the impressionistic world of Tar Moorehead and the factual
world of the country editor. Here the events that had so
impressed a small-town boy, ”--births and deaths, what the
churches are doing...Who gets hurt during the fall thresh-
ing or shoots somebody for getting gay with his wife..."20
are transposed into the mature efforts of the country editor
"--to give expression to the joys and sorrows, the political
fights, all of the everyday life of a very typical American

community."21

That Marion, Virginia, was not a typical
American community in the 1920's but that it was rather
typical of the America that Anderson would have preferred
in an age devoted to materialism seems not to have occured
to him. Rather, the small Midwestern town of the late nine-
teenth century is here factually recreated as an oasis devoted
to human life remote from a world devoted to things.
Reaffirmation of his belief in the intrinsic worth
of human life is evident as Anderson moves beyond reportorial
journalism and shows that the factual material he is dealing
with is significant in its own right. Here in the news items
describing the life of the town he shows the core of his be-
liefs: the worth and dignity of the individual, the enduring
solidity of lives lived in close proximity to other lives, and
the satisfaction inherent in a good job well done. All this

is recorded in Hello Towns! and the result is complete

 

20Quoted by Schevill, 246.

272

affirmation of the validity of his rejection of materialism.

The reason for his inability to carry through creative
projects is equally evident. During these months his life
had been devoted to rediscovering the essence of his America,
and in the mass of details that that essence consists of,
there was no time for the evaluating, selecting, and organizing
that is essential to creative writing. During this time he
was working on the foundation for his work in the 1930's, work
that was as different from the work of the previous few years
as Winesbur , 9133; was from Marching Egg. During the next
few years he was to record the impact of industrialism on the
individual in the South as he had attempted to do it for the
Midwesterners in .1399; m, and he was becoming acquainted
with those individuals just as he had done earlier in Clyde,
Ohio, and had given them significance and existence in Kings-
REE- _I_{_§_.'_L;_L_Q Towns! starts him. in that direction by enabling
him to gain insight into the lives of his people through
intuitive understanding of their lives and problems.

Like so many of his earlier works, ggllg Towns! has
a fireword in which he explains the background or the purpose
of the work. In this he records briefly how and why he had
turned to country journalism: "...there is no place for the

artist in American life,”22 he says. Writing Should not be

 

228herwood Anderson, Hello Towns! (New Yerk, 1929),

273

an occupation but a spontaneous thing, and in America one
must have an occupation, so he had drifted aimlessly, finally
resolving to be a countryman. After buying his farm, he had
been idle until he bought the newspapers, finding through
them purpose and belonging in hiszural environment. This
presentation of what is ostensibly a factual account is over-
simplified and dramatized to the extent that it, too, has be-
come part of the Anderson myth, but it does convey the spirit
of what Anderson had done: he had found a place in America
where he belonged, where life could be lived outside of the
main stream of American competitiveness, and for a year he had
known a great deal of personal contentment.

In his role as country editor he found primarily the
identity that he had been seeking: the intimate relation-
ship with the human lives around him that had been missing
since his early years in Clyde. Here he saw himself in the
role of chronicler, story-teller, and sage to his peeple, and
in time he hoped to become elder philosopher, commentator,
and interpreter of the new America that was invading the
South. Such an identity demands full acceptance of what he
finds as well as rejection of the view of the small town por-
trayed by Sinclair Lewis. As he records in "A Beginning,”
”'The names ZEEEE Street, Elmer Gantr , Babbit7 are lies in
themselves...They are too easy. There is too much malice in

them'”.23 And he points out that small town life is the

 

23Ibid., 19.

 

 

r.

 

274

essence of human life as he commences his career as editor
at the heart of the life he had sought.

gellg Towns! is organized to represent a year in the
life of the country editor, from November to the following
October, and in it Anderson has compiled a cross-secaon of
the life of the small town in pieces ranging from accounts
of shooting scrapes, the results of the ”brutal innocence”
he had portrayed as early as Winesbur , thg, to editorials
on "The New Frankness," which he sees as the major redeeming
feature of modern life, on Van Gogh, on the role and meaning
of the town band, on the solid virtues of American life, on
the need for remodeling of the town jail. Throughout the
factual accounts of events that occur in the town, the ap-
parent trivia that occupy the attention and the central role
in the gossip in the small town, two aspects of his treatment
are at once apparent.

First, Anderson attempts to portray these things as
significant in themselves, as manifestations of the meaning
of life rather than as isolated segments of fact included
to edify the idly curious or to flatter the participants.
In so doing Anderson has rejected the usual journalistic
techniques of incorporating who, what, when, and where in
the lead paragraph and then following with amplification,
and he has utilized his storytelling style to inject into
news items the overtones of the larger picture of which

they are a part, the meaning behind the events themselves,

275

and often the editorial interpretation or opinion of that
meaning. In so doing Anderson has applied the craftsmanship
of which he was so conscious to the raw material of news and
raised its presentatibn above the level of rote regurgitation
of fact by writing to his readers as participants in the
human experience rather than as mere bystanders whose curiosi-
ties must be satisfied.

Second, Anderson has, in the selection and presentation
of his news stories, accomplished what many critics maintained
he had done in Winesburg, th2 although he had not. Here Ander-
son presents a picture of the life of the small town as he both
saw and experienced it. This could not be done in a single
issue or two of either or both of the papers, but over a year's
time the cross-section was possible, as the compilation in
figllg Towns! indicates, and here the factual material becomes
the microcosm of small town life and of human life everywhere.

The selection of a few paragraphs at random from almost
any of the news stories is sufficient to illustrate these
Qualities in Anderson's news presentation. Under the heading
”At Chilhowie, William McVey 15 Kills His Cousin Paul McVey

17." Anderson incorporates them all:

The quiet and peace of an unusually beautiful
Sunday was broken by a shocking killing at Chil-
howie. William McVey, son of Andy McVey, a far-
mer living near Chilhowie, stabbed and killed
his cousin, Paul McVey, a son of Harrison McVey,
another farmer and the brother of Andy McVey.

The cutting was done with a pocket knife and
the boy who did the cutting is but fifteen. His
dead cousin was seventeen.

276

Our correspondent says the boys had been

playmates for a long time. The two farms were

near each other. The boys had been trapping

and got into a quarrel over the ownership of

a steel trap. They became inflamed by passion

and a fight started. In the fight the younger

boy drew his pocket knife and stabbed his cousin

in the neck. The jugular vein was cut and the

boy died within the hour. William McVey was

brought to Marion and lodged in the jail here.24

Here is the essence of Anderson as journalist, as
townsman, as writer. First of all, the event is not treated
as news, nor is it in the sob-sister tradition. Rather it is
human tragedy, and the tone is that of regret and compassion.
There is no indignation or condemnation of the event; instead,
there is a recognition that such things happen because those
who do them are human, and behind the event are the implica-
tions of all that that entails. Here, too, the style which
Anderson employs is designed to engender in his readers the
empathy that he feels. This is not mere journalism; it is
an attempt to convey human feeling, and in doing so Anderson
has presented in microcosm the tragedy inherent in human life
as pointedly as he had in many of his short stories. In
accepting appearance rather than reality, he points out,
young McVey had allowed himself to be trapped as completely
as the boy in ”I'm a Fool.”

In addition to the recreation of human eXperience in
the news stories, Anderson has, in the included editorial

writings, presented a picture of himself in the new role he

 

24Ib1do .’ 52-53 0

277

has adopted for himself. In the editorials, as personal as
they often are, Anderson portrays himself as mentor, as
spokesman, as booster, as participant in the life of the
town. The editorial column becomes for him a pulpit, a
lectern, and a crackerbox as well as occasionally a confes-
sional. In ”Group Feeling” it becomes the latter, as he con-
fesses the inadequacy that he has always felt in the company
of others; in ”Here Comes the Band," he is a booster of one
of the town's sources of pride; in ”Gil Stephenson” he preaches
the doctrine of craftsmanship; in "Hello Towns!" and in "After-
math” he pulls himself close to the crackerbox and gives his
candid appraisal of the world, the town, and the events that
keep both from stagnation. In the combination of them Anderson
has found the identity that he sought, and he has found a place
for himself where he can practice it. Neither role nor place
is enough to absorb his full attention for the rest of his
life, but its significance lies in the fact that for the first
time he feels that he has found the foundation that he had
been seeking since he first rejected materialism and industri-
alism and began his search for something permanent and worth-
while in American life.

gellg Towns! may seem at first glance to be a collec-
tion of news items, sketches, random thoughts, jottings, and
ideas put together in a hit or miss fashion reminiscent of
the pattern of a shotgun blast, but it is not. Rather it is
one of Anderson's most carefully constructed books in spite of

278

the fact that the material in it is much more diverse than
anything he had attempted before. This is the biography of
a town that he said he had been writing in.§ggglflh;§§. Howe
ever, that had dealt with one manifestation of the town's
life, whereas here he attempts to incorporate it all, and
the structural device of using a montheby-month approach ties
it together as well as it could be done. It is not unified
because the events and relationships that make up a town's
life are not that, and the diversity of the material occurs
just as spontaneously as the events themselves seem to come
to the surface of life. Tragedy, humor, pathos, trivia, none
of it significant except in its relationship to the lives in-
volved and yet part of the essence of life itself, are the
materials of a town's life, and it is precisely this material
that Anderson has put together to make this book.

Here is the record of a man who looks at the town
around.him and finds it worthwhile and.meaningful just as
he shews that he has found meaning in the role that he is
playing in that town. That this has nothing to do with
journalism he is well aware: "I cannot be a slave to the
papers. I shall let my fance loose...There are stories
here...There will be this life of the town and.my own life
outside. There is the life of the fancy too. Perhaps news-

papers have become too much newspapers,"25 he comments in

251b1d., 40.

279

setting forth the philosOphy of his new venture, at the same
time revealing that his new life and role have not made him
forget his larger role as a writer. Although he feels that

he is in the town and of the town, he still has another duty
and responsibility, one that becomes more and more important

to him again as the novelty and the wonder of his new position
wear off. That duty and responsibility is that of the creative
artist, and as he admits, while he has found a place for him-
self that is as stable and permanent as he had wanted, never-
theless the creative life can.never achieve stability or it
ceases to be creative. As the book progresses, three things
are increasingly evident: his attention to affairs of the
outside world, his preoccupation with the problem of the artist
in society, and his further injection of flmncy into journalism
as he moves back into the role of writer. '

In venturing out of the small town world to go to
Washington to interview Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of
Commerce under Coolidge, he voices the first of a number of
vague discontents that recur as the book becomes increasingly
personal: "we who live in country towns miss certain things,
The radio and the phonograph can bring us music by the best
orchestras...we can hear speakers talk, but there are things

we cannot get..."26 An artist needs not only raw material as

 

261bid., 118.

280

he finds it around him, but he needs the stimulation that
will help him to make something out of it. In going on to
describe his impressions of Hoover he shows a new awareness
of the meaning of the age outside the town as well as an
insight into what both Hoover and his age needed, the
cleansing effects of the failure that was to come so soon.

TheyIZEhe industrialist§7 have raised this Mr.
Hoover up out of the ranks of men as perhaps the
finest Republican example of manhood and ability
in present day American political and industrial
life. He is, apparently, a man very sure of him-
self. His career has been a notable one. From
a small beginning he has risen steadily in power.
There has never been any check. I felt, looking
at him, that he has never known failure.

It is too bad never to have known that. Never

to have known miserable nights of remorse, feel-

ing the world too big and strange and difficult

for you.

This moment of insight that almost sees a need for
one of the most perplexing problems of the age in the coming
depression is not prophetic, of course, but it does indicate
that Anderson is coming to a new and valid understanding of
his time, possible only because for the first time he felt
a solid foundation of belonging beneath him. As he concludes
the essay, he points this out:

I had tried to be smart and had not been

smart. I had got myself into a false position.

What happens to the age in which a man lives is

like the Mississippi, a thing in nature. It is

no 5°38 quarreling with the age in which you
live.

27Ihid., 123. 281bid., 126.

281

In such pieces as ”Conversing With Authors,” "Just
Walking,” ”The Winter's Trade,“ and "In New York,” Anderson
shows his continued concern with the problems of the artist
in society, but here, too, his point of view has altered
perceptibly from the earlier positions cited in‘A|§tggye
Tellerf§_§tg§y and‘ghg Mbdern writer. Whereas formerly he
was concerned with the lack of attention, understanding, and
financial support which a serious artist encounters, here his
point of view has shifted from criticism of society for its
position to one of attempting to eXplain the artist and at
the same time pleading for understanding. In the first of
these, "Conversing With Authors,” Anderson attempts to mask
his concern with a satirical, jocular style, but beneath this
his genuine feelings are evident. Here, too, Anderson seems
aware of something entirely new to him: if the author is
misunderstood or ignored by society, very frequently it is
his own fault for not attempting to bridge the gap between
himself and his fellows. Beneath the surface of the piece
and the fun that Anderson pokes at himself as he suggests
segregation for all authors, it is evident that he realized
that the surface intimacy between him and the town was just
on the surface. In spite of his eagerness to belong to the
town there were too many reasons why he could not. The towns-
men were aware that he was part of a larger world of which

they knew nothing, and he could not forget it himself.

282

Examples of the injection of his artistic fancy into
journalism abound. Not only has he introduced.more or less
stock fictitious characters such as Buck Fever and Hannah
Stoots in.humorous, semi-satirical bits, but he has incor-
porated sketches such as "A Mountain Dance,” ”Small Town
Notes," and ”A Criminal's Christmas," which, although fiction,
are nevertheless as true in their insight into the tragedy of
rural life as any of his news columns. ”A Mountain Dance”
depicts the insistent forces that carry the race spontaneously
through its cycle, while ”Small Town Notes" are simple, direct,
and compassionate portrayals of two men, one of whom dreamed
about being a baseball player but was unable to be, and the
other who used his wife as an excuse for his inability to do
things that men were expected to do. Both of the men are
grotesques, and either sketch might have been the nucleus of
another Winesburg story. ”A Criminal's Christmas,” reprinted
from Vanity Egig, is the story of a youth whose dishonesty is
rooted in love and compassion, while his reversion to honesty
is a product of fear. It is one of the old Anderson paradoxes
that baffle the seeker for an easy answer.

Throughout the book, through the unfoldingnnnths and
the changing seasons of the structure Anderson has given it,
one is aware of the cycle of small town life through its
interpreter-editor as in none of Anderson's works, even in
gag, where he had tried to recreate such a world from his

memory and imagination. Here, however, he has incorporated

283

fact and fancy, observation and interpretation, and through
the device of the year's cycle presented a picture of the
ebb and flow of rural life as a montage of sight, sound,
and feeling. It is a picture of life that is real, that is
understood, and that is believed in by its portrayer. Here
rather than.in A New Testament is Anderson's real statement
of belief and affirmation, his first tribute to the life he
had lost and then found.

Anderson concludes the book with an answer to the
question ”Will Ybu Sell Ybur Newspapers?” that many people
had asked him. His reply was indirect but as negative as
he could make it. Here, he says, in this place and this
town he has found that he belonged: ”Yesterday I drove my
car down a street of our town I had never been on before.

I didnot know the street was there. Men hailed me. Women
and children were sitting on doorsteps. 'It is our editor.’
...I have a place in this community. How difficult to feel
that in the city."29 Later he says, ”A man has to work. He
cannot be just a teller of old tales. He has to find some-
where a place into which he fits.“30 A direct answer to the
question is unnecessary.

As Anderson concluded‘flgllg‘ggwggl he felt some of
his old confidence returning. He saw it as ”...a damn good

book...one of the best I ever did...It's a real picture of

A“...

2212i§-. 336. 3°Itia., 339.

28#

life--fragmentary as I have been lately, but real..."31

In this case his judgment, in spite of his enthusiasm, was
almost sound. .ESllQ Towns! is a good book of its type. It
does show the potentialities inherent in journalism when it
can afford to reject commercialism and to take upon itself
the role that had traditionally been played by men such as
Irwin Anderson and as now he saw himself to be: the role of
the wandering storyteller who combines entertainment, news
spreading, and respect for the human experience in all its
implications as well as for its factual basis.

The book is also both real and fragmentary. It is
real because it has been drawn from life, and the people and
situations it describes are the material out of which human
life is made, and it is fragmentary because that material was
not assimilated and digested as it had to be before it could
become more than a tentative portrayal of life. The book
affirms his belief in the material he had incorporated in
it, and he was eager to do something with it, but still he
Ididn't know what he could do. As a result, in spite of the
strong affirmation of the raw material in the book, he turned
his back on it temporarily while he sought a creative theme
that he could take hold of and make into a novel. But nothing

would come, and with his son Bob running the papers he roamed

 

31Quoted by Schevill, 257.

285

through the South, absorbing its sights, sounds, and exper—
iences. His life as he realized at this point was as frag-
mentary as‘ggllg Towns!, but the newspapers were not enough
to tie it together, and again, he felt defeated.

Meanwhile, however, he published three short works,
each in a limited edition, and each a cameo-like example of
the creative craftsmanship of which he was capable. More
importantly, however, the three of them combine to provide
the bridge between Anderson the country editor, the role that
he had temporarily adopted, and Anderson the townsman, who is
very much aware that the town is not a refuge but a part of
the world. 'In these three works the values he has affirmed
in.§e;lg Towns! are restated, while at the same time the
direction that his attention, his thinking, and his work dur-
ing the final years of life were to take is pointed out.

The first of these works is Nearer the 939.33 M, a
book of only 35 pages, hand set and printed in a limited edi-
tion of 500 cepies by the Westgate Press in San Francisco.
The book contains two short essays that are almost completely
ignored, even.by Anderson scholars, but it occupies a key
position in any attempt to understand the emergence of the
new Andersonian role of townsman-philosopher, a role that
was inevitably assumed as the novelty of small-town journal-
ism wore off and Anderson again became convinced that he

could not cut himself off from the world in which he lived.

286

The first of the essays, untitled, is primarily a bio-
graphical sketch including in abbreviated form much of the
material that Anderson has used so many times, but in the
last half of the essay he reveals what may be the reason why
he was having difficulty resuming his creative work after his
long period of introspection: ”I was associating altogether
too much with one Sherwood Anderson. I never grew so tired
of a man in my life."32

The purchase of the newspapers, he points out, had
served a dual purpose: to provide him with a small but
reasonably secure income, and to give himself something to
do that would take him out of himself and once more into the
living world: ”In Virginia there is a touch of the South
without too much of it. It suited me. I had no quarrel
with my surroundings or my friends. My quarrel was with.ny-
self."33 Now, having found his place and his role in life,
he finds, ”...that it is the most fun of anything I have ever
done in life."34 The most important part of his new life,
however, is summed up in the essay's conclusion:

And, in addition, there is the tremendous
advantage of being in close and constant touch

with every phase of life in an American com-

munity every day of the year.

What could any writer ask more enticing
than that?35

 

32Sherwood Anderson, Nearer the Grass Roots (San Fran-
cisco, 1929), 7.

33Ibid. 34Ibid., 16. 351bid., 18.

287

Here, almost apologetically as an afterthought, Ander-
son has indicated the true reason for his purchase of the
farm and the papers, for his long period of introspection,
for the bitterness and wondering that had characterized his
life for so many of his years. It was part of his search
for a solid foundation of values and of place, both for his
own life and for his work. Now at last he feels that he has
found both, he has rid himself of the specter of the past,
and he is free to live in the world of his age. However,
he is still faced with the problem of finding his way back
into that world as townsman-editor and as writer-artist.

The second of the two essays is ”Elizabethton, An
Account of a Journey." In this essay, even shorter than the
first, Anderson points out the direction that his future work
and his interests would take. Elizabethton, Tennessee, in-
corporated as recently as 1905, was one of the new Southern
cities that, blessed by abundant water power and cheap labor,
grew as a result of the twentieth-century industrial revolu-
tion in the South. Here were some of the largest rayon mills
in the country, and, as Anderson points out, "It has been
held up as representing the industrialist's finest and latest
achievement in building an industrial town."36 Also it was
the home of low wages, long hours, insecurity of tenure, and

all the other evils of industrialism, including the dehumanizing

—_

36Ibid., 21.

288

aspects that Anderson had protested for so long. When the
workers' dissatisfaction reached the point of eruption there
was a strike, and Anderson the editor drove over from Marion
for the story. What he saw as an observer was one of the
crucial factors that led him back into the world that he found
he could not ignore.

This essay is a series of impressions, including
among them more restrained, almost objective pictures that
still reflect the old Anderson as well as those that fore-
shadow much of his future work. The first reflects the old,
but regret has replaced indignation:

Here is a town not more than five years old.

Already the buildings have that half-decrepit

worn-out look that makes so many American towns

such disheartening places. There is a sense of

cheapness, hurry, no care for the buildings in

which men and women are to work. "The premature

aging of buildings in America," says my friend

Van W k Brooks, ”is the saddest thing in Amer-

ica.”g$

Coupled with this are new observations, especially
of the thin, too-young mill girls who lie about their ages
to find jobs in the mills. This was a facet of industrialism
that had escaped him in his earlier fight against the giant;
now his old indignation rises at the thought that the girls
in their poverty have no choice but to lie. As he looks at

the mills in which they work he again sees something new:

 

37Ibid., 23.

289

The mills themselves had that combination of

the terrible with the magnificent that is so

disconcerting. Anyone working in these places

must feel their power. Oh, the beauty and won-

der of the modern intricate machines. It is

said that many of the girls and women in these

places are half in love with the machines at

which they work. We have one of the modern

wonder machines here in our own little country

print shop, a modern linotype. Joe, the young

man who runs it, has pride in it. It is sugar-

human in its accuracy, in its tirelessness.

Here, in Anderson's first direct concern with the
machine in almost ten years since the appearance of Poor
White, is indication that Anderson regarded the machine as
more than a symbol of the industrial conscience behind it.
Formerly the machine itself symbolized the villain that
destroyed the craftsman and his work and deprived man of
his pride and his creative ability. In Poor White he had
asserted that man had conceived the machine thinking that
it would result in good, but he was deluded and mistaken.

At the same time he saw it as a thing in itself, the product
of man's inventive genius, and neither good nor bad except
as man's mind directs; and it is in man that the ultimate
answer lies. He restates this belief and the old bitter-
ness flashes as he comments, "There is always the old ques-
tions-to make men rise in nobility to the nobility of the
machines."39 It hadndt happened in Elizabethton, he reflects.
However, he sees symptoms of the possibility that it

may yet, as the new union gives dignity and recognition to

 

331hid., 25. 391bid.

290

the workers and they find a new sense of belonging and of
purpose. Once again the mystical unity that he had striven
to attain in Marching Men reasserts itself: ”'They have got
a realization of each other. They have got, for the moment,
a kind of religion of brotherhood and that is something.”40
More importantly for himself, however, is his instinctive
selection of a new symbol for the people of the South as
Irwin Anderson and Abraham Lincoln had become for the Mid-
west. Noticing a meaningless monument erected in the town
square in the same type of shoddy construction as the town
itself, he reflects, ”How I would have liked to see one of
those delicately-featured, hard-bodied little mountain girls,
done in stone by some real artist standing up there."41 It
is more than a wish, however; it is an indication of re-
surging creative power, but its culmination was still in
the future, giving rise to Beyond Desire. Meanwhile, his
personal search for a way to incorporate his new awareness
into creative work continued, and to this problem he added
concern for the'victims of Southern industrialism.

The second of these short typographer's m 313
£2323 was published in London in 1929. This book, also in
a limited edition of 530 copies was printed by Elkin Mathews
and Marrot as one of the Wbburn Books. Called.§liggl§gg.tgg

Lost Novel, it contains two short pieces of these titles,

 

4°1hid., 34. 411mm, 35.

291

both previously published in periodicals. The first of
these, "Alice," is a brief attempt to define and make tangi-
ble the beauty of a woman, a beauty that he sees as an inner
thing, mobility to give of herself and to project understand-
ing and trust from herself to the men around her. Diametric-
ally Opposed to Philip Wylie's concept of Momism, what Ander-
son personifies in Alice is the same intuitive wisdom and
feeling that he found in his mother and that Sam.McPherson
and Tar Moorhead had found in theirs. Here, however, Anderson
has made it more articulate and more specific, with less of
the dream-quality that surrounded his earlier portrayals of
the same thing. Alice herself is made an East Tennessee
mountain girl grown into a woman of the world rather than
the earlier Midwestern wife-mother, but the image is the
same; Anderson is feeling his way toward the monument to

the mill girl, and this is one of his tentative sketches, a
marriage of the past and the present chronologically, that
in Anderson‘s intuitive perception are merely two facets of
the lasting strength and power of women. He was to become
increasingly aware of both of these as he began to conceive
of Perhaps 31913933 and fit Brandon.

The other piece, ”The Lost Novel” is another attempt
at something about which he had bought much: the mystic
qualities of the creative experience that occurs not in the
artist's hands or as a result of his materials but in his
mind and emotions. To him the resulting work is only the

292

tangible symbol of the act of creation, and it is less
important than the act itself, which only the artist can
experience.

In this short work, too, Anderson has bridged the
gap between past and present both in his own life and in
his work, just as he had in Nearer £22.§£é£§W§222§9 and
again he pointed out future trends in both. Also, and more
importantly, he has written one of his most pleasant works,
embodying the personification of Anderson at his Midwestern
story-telling best, seeing connections where none are ap-
parent and finally making them clear, rambling genially
rather than blundering determinedly to his point, and at
the same time providing sketches that are graphic in their
insight into the problems with which he is dealing. It is
unfortunate that these shorter works have been so limited
in distribution and in appeal to his critics.

The third of this series of short books was Th§_
American County Fair, published in 1930, also in a limited
edition of 875 cOpies, hand-printed by the Southworth Press
for Random House. This, too, is Anderson at his Midwestern
best in a sketch that combines his wealth of feeling for
the smooth movement of the race horse with his love of the
rural countryside and the uncontaminated past.

Impressionistic rather than consciously descriptive,
the sketch embodies Anderson's attempt to recapture and

convey the sight, the sound, the flavor, and above all,

 

293

the feeling of that exciting and typically rural aspect of
American life. The American Countylggig is another of
Anderson's testaments. It is much more deeply felt and
spontaneous than his efforts to recapture the feeling in
verse, and it is more valuable and lasting because he is
not consciously poetic; rather, he is striving to convey
feeling and to describe at the same time as he had learned
to do for the papers. That this interlude of the fair is
a passing thing, a dream rather than a fact, Anderson is
well aware, however, as he concludes with the realization
that even the beauty of the race horse is fleeting: ”There
is, after all, the uncertainty of this sort of thing. Ybu
have to take chances in life.”42

Between 1926 and 1931 Anderson's creative ability
was not dead as some of his critics maintained and as he
himself feared. Although.A New Testament is not of the
calibre that might be expected of him and his output was
slight, nevertheless when he permitted himself to venture
into the role of townsman-observer, his intuitive percep-
tion of meaning and his ability to communicate it effectively
were still very much alive. His main trouble during these
years was that he was attempting to use the wrong material.

Instead of moving into the area that his rediscovery showed

 

42Sherwood Anderson, The American County Fair (New
York, 1930), 130

294

him had the meaning he had been seeking, he was attempting
to be the modern Anderson of My Marriages and M laugh-
[323, and he was working on the wrong material at the wrong
time.

During most of 1929 he was working on a novel first
called.Ng gaze, and later Ng_§gg, Sacred Service, and finally
Beyond Desire, but it had nothing to do with the later novel
of that name. Rather, it was very much in the modern liber-
ated tradition, a tradition that he had put behind him when
he rejected that life in 22;; Laughter. Desperately trying
to prove that he was not a has-been and trying to regain the
criticaland financial success that he had had with.§gyk
Lagghter, he revived its approach and technique. The novel
as he conceived it was to be "...the story of a man having
his roots in the pro-War life, accepting the present-day
post-War life,” and he was in love with a girl who was ”...
the young female kid of today. She has had sex experience
and will have more, when she wants it.”43 But the novel
would not come through because it was a lie and he knew it,
but he couldn't force himself to admit it yet. In December,‘
1929, he wrote his publisher, Horace Liveright, that ”I
think you know...that I have to have this book right, not
only on account of its chances of success, but also because
of‘myself.' I want to ship out of me this sense of defeat I
have had...All I can say is that I will do nothing else..."44

43Letters, 199. 441nm” 200-201.

295

Two weeks later, however, after a meandering trip
from Chicago to Florida he knew that he had to admit the
truth, both to himself and to Liveright:

I never will write that novel now. The truth
is I have been forcing my pace on it all the time.

I'm going to fool around down here for a month
or two and then go up into North Carolina and hang
around there. The novel went wrong because I
never was honest-to-God behind it. There were
some gaudy chapters, but she didn't move.

She didn't move because I'm through with the
ordinary problems of middle-class people in love,
etc.

I've got an interest, though, and I'm going
to go to it, though I'm not going to make promises
about delivery. It is working people in the mills
particularly the working people, the poor whites,
in the mills in the South. I‘m going to build my
novel around a little poor white mill girl, what
happens to her coming to town, in a strike, etz
It's living stuff whether it will sell or not. 5'
With this he began another period of wandering, but

this time it was directed and purposeful. With the papers
in the hands of his son Robert to provide for him and for
his other children, John and Marion, he was free to follow
his new direction, wherever it might lead. He schemed to
free himself from Ripshin Farm by turning it into a club,

a project which he described to his friend and benefactor,
Burton Emmett, early in 1930, but the plan was fortunately
unsuccessful because the farm was to be a base of operations

and a place in which to gain perspective during the remaining

451bid., 202-203.

296

years of his life. At this time, however, he was beginning
his last search, and unconsciously he was attempting to cut
himself free from any ties that might hinder it as he had so
often done in the past.

At this time two factors were combining to influence
the direction that this new search would take. The first
was the economic collaspse that led to the depression of the
1930's, intensifying the problems of the Southern mill workers.
The fading of Coolidge prosperity into Hoover depression made
him aware of industrialism not only as an enslaver of his
people but as a further symbol of a society that was sick
both economically and fundamentally. Through this he began
to take an interest in political and economic systems as such
for the first time in hislife, hoping that a cure for both
the symptom and the sickness might be found.

The second factor that entered at this time to direct
his search was a young lady twenty years younger than he.
Eleanor Capenhaver was a Marion girl who had ventured out
into the world, become a social worker for the Y.W.C.A., and
then devoted herself to helping the mill girls of the South.
It was Miss Copenhaver who accompanied him to Elizabethton
and who introduced him to the mill girl who became the symbol
of his new interest. Their friendship soon became love, but
both were reluctant to marry, and they did not until July,
1933, more than three years after they met. In the meanwhile
they often traveled together, Eleanor in her official capacity

297

and as guide, and Anderson as observer, as sympathizer, and
on occasion as active participant in the attempts of the
workers to bring order and dignity into their lives.

With his new direction, with his new sense of a role,
and with a secure base in the Virginia hills from which he
could Operate, his sense of equilibrium returned and with it
the confidence that he could write. He began the new Beyond .
Desire, cautiously rather than hurriedly, and he continued
to travel about the South during 1930, returning at intervals
to Marion but always conscious of the world outside. By the
end of the year he could write:

...the artist is, after all, partly a product

of his environment...He does not escape the gen-

eral tone and mood of the world in any event.

It is antagonistic now...We have to participate

...I can't quite draw away from my fellows no

matter how much I try. I draw away and then

come Egck, waver about uncertainly a great

deal.

At this point he was ready to participate in the world
again for the first time since he had turned in upon himself
in despair at the end of 1923, and he was ready to work. He
was slower now, and his optimism at his chances for success
was tempered a great deal by his creative difficulties as
well as by the grimness of the world outside the town, but it
was still strong, and once more he set out to try to cope with
the problem of the dehumanization of men, this time in a politi-
cal and economic framework rather than in the determined

45'.I:hid., 226.

298

emotionalism of the past. He had few illustiens about his
chances for success either in writing or in solving the

country's problems, but he was eager to try.

CHAPTER VIII
RE-ENTRY INTO THE WORLD

Coincidental with the country's descent into the de-
pression of the thirties, Anderson's reawakened interest in
the problems of individuals living in an industrial society
became acute, dominating his thinking and his writing during
1930, 1931, and 1932. Just prior to the depression his work
had taken up essentially where he had left off with Egg;
While, with the sudden impact of industrialism on individuals
who had learned to live in an agricultural society, merely
‘shifting the locale from the Midwest to the South. This
stage did not last long, however, and he learned quickly
that the view was dated. Combining to move his approach
beyond this stage were two factors. First, he could view
the situation with much clearer perspective because he no
longer felt the threat of an industrial society's domination
over himself. The second, more important reason was the
rapid extension of the depression to every part of Ameri-
can life, even to towns in the Virginia hills. This made
him realize that the real force behind industrialism in
any society dominated by materialism is the economic system.

His personal non-involvement was important. During

his earlier attempts to delineate the effects of the impact
299

300

of industrialism on the individual he saw himself as one

of those people. Not only was the memory of the Elyria
experience still clear in his mind, but as an advertising
writer he was dependent upon mass production for his living
and he saw no way to free himself; he could only hope. Now,
however, that was behind him, and with family responsibilities
at a minimum he no longer saw himself as a victim. At the
same time he not only had his own industrial experience to
draw upon, but he was in a remarkable position to watch from
the sidelines as factories began to dominate the Southern sky-
line and the lives of the hill people. When Northern Ohio had
been taken over by the factories in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century he had been too young to know what was
happening. Now he knew what to look for.

The depression, of course, was highly influential in
changing his view of the problem of industrialism. In late
1930 he wrote ”The general spirit...seems to be one of heavy
sadness...A little bit, I guess, America is being caught up
with...more and more men unemployed, while there are more
goods than ever being produced."1 In common with the rest
of the country he had no idea that the difficulty was to be
as severe as it became, but he went on, "An artist cannot
help being affected by the mood of his time...We have now,
in our cities, really hard times...We have hordes of unem-

ployed. There are bread lines everywhere."2

1Letters, 231-232.

2Ibid., 232.

/‘

 

 

301

During Anderson's years of self-imposed exile he had
paid almost no attention either to Coolidge prosperity or
to the business dominated political structure behind it,
but with his re-entry into the outside world he became aware
immediately not only of prosperity's aftermath but of the
political and economic irresponsibility that brought it
about. By the end of 1930 he was fully committed to the
search for a system that would not only enable the peOple
with whom he had always aligned himself to maintain human
dignity but which would also prevent the sort of collapse
that had engulfed the country. The writing that he turned
out during the next few years was dominated by both the pro-
blem and the search, and after his abortive attempt to sup-
port the Danville, Virginia, textile strike during the fall
and winter of 1930-1931, he, like most other intellectuals
’and especially writers, turned to look at Communism and its
‘promises as a possible answer. However, stung too many times
by too-rapid committment, he was cautious, but his flirtation,
brief though it was, has often been misconstrued. In Novem-
ber, 1930, he wrote, "I am not so sure...that we want Social-
ism and certainly not wholesale Communism."3 He did not con-
demn either, however; he wanted a closer look.

Travelling through the South, looking at the problem
and talking to its victims, and then returning to Marion to

 

3Ibid., 227.

 

4“

302

think and to write occupied most of his time through the
next few years. Essays such as "Cotton Mill" in Scribners,
"Factory Town” and ”Loom Dance” as well as ”Danville, Vir-
ginia” in‘ghg_ggz Re ublic, and others appeared, all of them
concerned with the sick giant industrialism and the relation-
ship between man and machine. At the same time he was parti-
san but detached, fascinated by his renewed interest in the
machines and pessimistic about their effect on his people.
To Ralph Church he described his position clearly:
I am sitting in my print shop, a great snow-

storm raging outside, some 18 inches down now

and more coming. I doubt whether I shall ever

return to Paris, Stein's room, Lipps, etc.

Lately I have produced little in the imagina-
tive world.

I work here, and I got interested in modern
factories. I spent part of last winter at that
and will return to it this winter, some notion
of a prose full of machinery.

Things will crack over here presently. The
machines throw more and more out of work. Un-
employment will grow chronic. The American
industrial scheme isn't going to work out.

I look for a time of agitation, new interest
in politics, discussions breaking out again.
The tired, cynical crowd will have to cough it
up.

Right now the reality of lifz is more fan-
tastic than any imaginary life.

Early in 1931 he began to make a book out of the es-

says, observations, and ideas engendered by his new venture

4Ibid., 233.

 

303

out into the industrial south. He was depressed at the
failure of the Danville strike, he was broke, as usual,
and the book reflects these two factors although in spite
of the regret, the occasional indignation and bitterness,
and the concern about the seductive appeal of the machine,
Anderson is not despairing. He is excited and at times ale
most optimistic. He is not yet concerned with the depression,
however; that is to come later in Puzzled America. Here he
is trying to recapture the meaning of industrialism as it
impressed him during his wandering. In this book Anderson
no longer deals with industrialism as an abstraction; for
the first time he takes his reader into the factories and
makes them come alive.

This new book, PerhapsIflgmgg, published in 1931 while
Anderson was putting together a series of lectures in order
to make some money, shows a number of significant but gen-
erally ignored factors about Anderson, his beliefs, and the
fascination that the new Southern industrialism held for
him. Because he had been too young for the great period
of labor protest and unrest that industry knew in the com-
parable period in his own Midwest in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, it was almost as though he had turned the
clock back in this way as well as in his return to the rural,
simpler life.

Two themes run through the essays in Perhapsiflgggg:
the wonder that Anderson felt at his introduction to the

304

actual machines about which he had theorized in the abstract
ten years before, and, as he points out in the introduction,
”a growing conviction that modern man is losing his ability
to retain his manhood in the face of the modern way of utiliz-
ing the machine and that what hope there is for him lies in
women."5 Thus there is combined Anderson's old fascination
with the new and with his deep faith in the long-suffering,
inarticulate, but intrinsically wise woman, a figure that
had resulted from the memories of his mother, whom he has
begun to see reincarnated in the person of the Southern mill
girl.

Out of this combination Anderson draws a third theme
that encompasses all of the above, the theme that the machine
is the dominating factor in American life, having conquered,
destroyed, or seduced anyone who would stand against it, and
that under the new order the machine age has come to have a
life of its own, tolerating the men and women who feed it
only because they are willing to become its slaves. At the
same time ironically and yet with poetic justice the machine
age itself is bringing about its own economic destruction.

The book itself is made up of a combination of free
verse, essays, sketches, and random thoughts, all centering
around Anderson's fascination with the industrialization of

the new South. The first piece, "Machine Song," is Anderson's

5Sherwood Anderson, Perhaps Women (New York, 1939), 7.

305

attempt to point out the seductive wonders of the age that
permits men to roar through space and time so rapidly that
the countryside becomes one. The tone of the piece, in
spite of the repetitious style, is clearly and understandably
eulogistic until at the very end Anderson points out the ex-
change that must be made before one can enter wholly into
the new age. Not only must he give up an unspoiled and
natural world, but most importantly, in asking, "Will you
give up individuality? Will you live, or die?”6 Anderson
points out man's greater loss. Just as certainly as he saw
the dehumanization ofthe industrial processes at work in
the North, so he sees it now, loose in the South that he had
thought was his refuge.

- In "Life Up Thine Eyes" Anderson epitomizes the new
mass-produced assembly-line type of industrialism in a de-
scription of an automobile plant that is dedicated to eradi-
cating the human element in the factory by eliminating it
in the workers themselves. Although the piece was written
before the days of automation, nevertheless Anderson observed
that the automatic factory was an ideal to be striven for.
The auto plants were coming as close to it as possible in
spite of the fact that the electronics field had barely been
tapped.and automation was no more than a dream. Even so, the

factory was rapidly taking the central role in the country:

51bid. , 17.

306

"Life up thine eyes,"7 Anderson implores in a,mockery of
reverence as he beholds it.
V In one of the most effective sketches in the book,
"Loom Dance," Anderson deals with two things: the wonder
of these machines that seemingly have a life and almost a
brain of their own, so powerful that it has set forth forces
in motion that no man can stop, demanding more and more from
the human slaves who serve them; and the momentary loom-
induced madness of the workers, culminating in revolt that
can slow the process on occasion, as it did on this, but
can never hope to overthrow the machine's domination.

The essays ”It is a Woman's Age” and ”Perhaps Women,”
in three parts, combine to convey what Anderson sees to be
the main result of this process and the only hope for man's
continued existence as an individual in the fact of this
force set loose by man and now beyond his control. In the
former he looks at the age that has taken dignity, confi-
dence, and ability from man and given it to the machines so
that the very essence of maleness, the qualities that in
every age in the past had made man a natural leader, have
now disappeared.

As he points out, this has not been brought about by
the machines themselves, but by the forces that the machines
have unleashed. "The big complicated beautiful machines...

7Ibid., 29.

307

are in.mo way to blame."8 Rather, although they are beauti-
ful, seductive, and awe-inspiring, nevertheless they are
things, but such things as man has never known before and
knows not how to live with:

The machines are beautiful with a cold kind

of classic beauty, but they are beautiful. In
motion they become gorgeous things. I have
stood sometimes for two or three hours in some
big factory looking at the machines in motion.
As I stand looking at them my body begins to
tremble. The machines make me feel too small.
They are too complex and beautiful for me.
My manhood cannot stand up against them yet.
They do things too well. They do too much...
I have to keep telling myself, "remember men
made those machines."

Thus, he points out, man is bound to feel that he has
lost his potency to the machine. His potency was based on
his ability to do things and to do them well, but he is un-
able to compete with the productivity of the machine, so he
is lost.. The women, on the other hand, who are coming into
the factories in increasing numbers, are aware of this lack
of potency in their male counterparts and tend to shun them
both as lovers and as mates because while the essence of male-
ness has been replaced by the machine, the essence of woman-
hood is internal, untouched, and untouchable by any outside
factor except a man. So, he points out, "No woman really

"10

wants a man who feels defeated, crushed by life, as are

the men around them. This tendency he sees as becoming more

 

8Ibid., 44. 9Ibid., 45. l°Ibid., 48.

308

and more significant. Combined with his beliefs that women
always rule in a factual age such as this and that the pas-
sion for possessions, the dominant feminine trait, is so common
in this age, it inevitably follows that this is an age designed
to be ruled by women.

The following essay, "Perhaps Women," builds on this
point, upon his observations in the factories, upon the in-
creasing complexities brought about by the factory system,
including technological unemployment resulting from the in-
creasing use of automatic machinery, and upon the confusion
that he finds, not only among workers, but on almost all
levels, including the artistic and the religious. He sees
the result of all this to be a process of degeneration that,
beginning with the working classes, has begun to work its
way upward, eating into the middle classes, emasculating and
dehumanizing each in turn until all of society becomes dis-
placed by the machine, not merely in the work that they per-
form but more importantly in their own sense of worth.

"Night in a Mill Town,” "Ghosts,” and ”Entering the
Mill at Night” explore the ramifications of this fear through
observations and through conversations with.mill owners,
supervisors, and workers. Here Anderson sees a tendency to
extent the concept of what has more recently been designated
"the Organization Man” to every level of industrial society
by placing each individual in his place in the hierarchy of
industrialism, promising each that he will be provided for

 

309

as long as he conforms to what is expected of him. Here in
the South he sees this theory brought to its inevitable con-
clusion in the mill villages, built and maintained by the
factories even to the extent that schools and churches are
built and teachers and preachers paid by the factory. This,
combined with the fact that the residents are effectively
disenfranchised by the lack of incorporation of the villages,
places the mill in effective control over the entire lives,
mental and spiritual as well as physical, of the people.

Thus, a new god has come into control of much of
America and as Anderson examines the scene, he finds its
control extending into almost every facet of American life,
preaching the gospel of mass production and mass consumption,
both stemming from the power of the machine. It is not a
pleasant picture, and Anderson sees no hope except in the
faith that he has always had in the power of women to save
men from the tragedy resulting from their own felly. He
asks them to assume this responsibility once again now that
they have the power.

I am asking for a statement of the inner

strength, of the living potence of present-

day American women, of their hunger, the

potentiality of new strength in them, that

may save American civilization in the face

of the machine.

The last part of the essay ”Perhaps Women” contains

Anderson's statement of his belief in the utter hopelessness

 

111b1d., 97.

 

310

of the position of men in the face of the machine. Man has
been seduced by be fake vicarious power that he derives from
the machine that has replaced him and provided him with other
machines to play with, and he is deprived of the creative and
imaginative powers that he once had. WOmen, on the other hand,
are untouched by this seduction because the machine has not
penetrated into their peculiar fUnction. It is time, he states,
for women to take over active control of the machine so that it
may be returned to_its proper place as a servant of man rather
than as his master. That the women are aware of this masculine
decline he makes clear at the end of the book in a vivid sketch
from the life of the mills: the women are making fun of the
men. They often do, he is told.

In Perhaps Egmgn the country editor seems at first
glance to have almost disappeared and the bitter, frustrated
Anderson of the earlier years to have returned. In a sense
this observation is true, at least on the surface. However,
in point of view and in tone, the country editor is very much
on the scene, observing, taking notes, and trying to deter-
‘mine the effects that would come about, now that "The bitch

12 These things do not affect

was trotting in the South...”
him directly now; he is secure in his own life and role, and
his approach is direct and concerned but detached. He is

attempting to report facts, impressions, and deductions

121b1d., 77.

311

about a phenomenon that he has conquered, accepting for
himself the automobile and the linotype as good because
they can be used and yet kept in their proper places, but
he is deeply concerned that this new god is threatening the
countryside and attempting to seduce the townspeople whom he
had come to know and love. This point of view he made quite
clear in a letter to Laura Lou Copenhaver, his future mother-
in-law, at about the time that Perhaps Women was published in
1931. ‘
There is little enough love of country. Mr.

Cepenhaver, in loving his bit of land out on the

Walker Mountain road, is loving his bit of the

U.S.A. It's the only sort of love of country

that is worth a whoop. All the rest is Just

talk. There you have Marion, a lovely little

town really. And how quickly the citizens

would rush forward to bring there some dirty

factory, making cheap goods of some kind, pour-

ing more cheap, shoddy goods out into the world.

And they would call that Love of Their Town. A

bit more money brought to a few, the rest de-

graded, all of us hoping to get up there among

the few.13

This is the sort of thing that the country editor is
trying to save his town from, the evil that had stricken
Bidwell so long before and that now,.even more seductive
in its chrome-plated elegance, is threatening the refuge
that he had thought was safe from it in his time at least.

If Anderson's solution to the problem of industrial-

ism seems too naive, dated, or romantic to be acceptable,

 

13Letters, 248.

312

too much versed in the mystic reverence with which he had
approached all of the women in his works thus far, placing
them on pedestals so high that they do not exist as human
beings, nevertheless there is much that is valid both in
observation and interpretation of the machine age and in
anticipation of its coming expansion and further domination
of the American scene. The dehumanizing aspects of the
mass production factory are obvious, ranging from the in-
clusion in union contracts of twelve minutes per day per-
sonal time to the remarkable rise in automation resulting
from electronic advances in World War II. The entirely
automatic factory has become a distinct possibility. Such
changes leave for man only the roles of servant to the machine
and of consumer of all these products, no matter how shoddy.
Technological unemployment is increasing, leisure resulting
from advances is devoted primarily to consumption of mass-
produced goods and entertainment, and the hidden persuaders
that Anderson knew in their embryonic state have grown to
awesome proportions. What he failed to foresee, of course,
was the inevitable seduction of the women through automatic
appliances, quick-freezing, and the material advances that
have taken function away from the female breast and made it
a curiosity so that women have also become drugged servants
of the system with their inner function reduced to that of

producing more and more consumers.

313

In Perhaps‘ggggn Anderson has attempted to incorpor-
ate the techniques of country Journalism as he had practiced
it in a book designed to attract the readers of the nation
rather than merely those of Smyth County, Virginia, and the
attempt is almost successful. In each of the pieces he does
.manage to convey a sense of the universality of the problem
of man versus machine by moving out of the particular and
showing its ramifications on a larger scale. On the other
hand, two difficulties prevent the book from being as good
as Eflllfl Towns! The first of these is the nature of the
material itself. In Journalism for the papers Anderson was
dealing with situations that were centered in human life,
something which he regarded as intrinsically valuable as
well as worthy of compassion. Here, however, the machines
dominate the essays, and although he manages to convey his
wonder and his fascination with them, nevertheless the feel-
ing is obviously insignificant when compared with his regard
for people, and the essays remain lifeless.

More serious are the technical shortcomings of the
essays. Having seen activity in the factories as a ritual-
istic dance, Anderson has attempted to convey this sense of
motion in his style. Unfortunately, in order to do so he
has resorted to the Jerky rhythms that he had used in Qagk
Laughter, and instead of reproducing the smooth motion of
machines fed by men who have incorporated their actions

into the cyclical demands of a mechanical cycle, Anderson's

314

style seems more appropriate to a grotesque caricature of
machine activity. Admittedly, his problem was a difficult
one that could not have been solved by resorting to his
usually satisfactory Midwestern rhythm, but the effect he
sought has not been attained by resorting to disJointed,
unrhythmical structures.

There is none of the bitterness in Perhaps 3.2229.
that Anderson had earlier eXperienced; frustration, of course,
is there as he feels his own insignificance and inability in
the face of this giant that he had feared so long in the
abstract. Now, having encountered it face-to-face and having
seen and almost succumbed to it as he saw the beauty of the
thing in action, he has realized that it is here to stay,
that he cannot protest its existence, and that he can merely
hope to contain it. The country editor's first excursion
away from his refuge while still carrying on his role has
sent him back in retreat to the security of the simple social
values of the village, but he sees even those threatened Just
as the Midwest had been threatened and then destroyed.

During this period Anderson was strongly attracted to
Communism as a way out of both the economic depression that
was deepening everywhere and out of the impasse that he saw
in industrialism. Something was needed to bring order to
the economic structure and something was needed to restore
human dignity to the worker. On all sides of him his fellow
intellectuals were going over, but he still mistrusted the

315

movement, as much as it appealed to him. He continued to
visit strikers, publishing his talk to the Harlan County,
Kentucky, miners in Harlan Miners S eak, together with Dos
Passos and others in 1932, and he wrote to his future wife
Eleanor Cepenhaver, ”I may conceivably go to communism.”14
Yet he could not. A few weeks later, in July, 1931, he
wrote to Edmund Wilson, "I suppose the Negroes are good
Communist material; but they will be making a mistake, won't
they, if they take that material Just because it is easy?”15
And later on his lecture tour that fall and winter, he con-
tinued this distrust, writing to several people his doubts.
To Theodore Dreiser he wrote:
I am puzzled about Communism, as I am sure

you may be. It may be the answer, and then it

may only be a new sort of Puritanism, more

deadly than the old moral Puritanism, a new

kind of Puritanism at last got power in one

place to push its rigid Puritanism home.

Meanwhile all this concern with and indecision about
the future of America, of industrialism, and of his own
economic and political beliefs had resulted in his next
novel, Beyond Desire, which used the title but not the sub-
stance of the aborted novel immediately preceding. Years

before, in Poor White, he had foreshadowed the substance

of this new novel when he had made one of his people say

14Quoted by Schevill, 278.

15Letters, 249. 15Ib1d., 256.

316

Well, there's going to be a new war here...

It won't be like the Civil War, Just shooting

off guns and killing people's bodies. At first

its going to be a war between individuals to

see what class a man must belong; then it is

going to be a long, silent war between classes,

between those who have and those who pan't

get. It'll be the worst war of all.1

In Beyond Desire Anderson has attempted to provide
the record of that war, the worst of all wars, as he saw
it being waged in the mill towns and the mining towns, and
the novel not only draws on the background of the observa-
tions he had made from his observation post on the front
lines in the South, but it reflects the uncertainty in his
own mind at the time as to the causes, the effects, and the
cures for the disorder around him. Written in a confused
time by a man who has not yet made up his mind about the
prOper course for his country or his people, the book con-
tains in it more of the genuine flavor of the age in which
it was written than any of Anderson's other novels, and the
material out of which it is made is part of the times them-
selves, undiffused by memory or passing events. It is the
first work of fiction in which Anderson has come directly
to grips with a problem in his time that he knows he can
neither retreat from nor reject, and he knows that there is

no longer any need for him to do either. As a result, Ander-

son has recaptured more immediacy in this novel than in any

17Poor White, 51.

317

of the others thus far except in the vignettes inigggg
miss. *

In this new novel Anderson has gone beyond the story
of the industrial revolution and unrest, however, and has
incorporated all that he has learned about the South, its
traditions, its people, and the peculiar psyche that makes
it a region or a sub-country rather than merely a part of
the whole. In it the central role is played by Red Oliver,
a boy of good but somewhat impoverished family (although his
mother is regarded as a ”strAnger") who goes to work in the
mills to work his way up in a manner approved by his class.
Later, however, he turns his back on that class and aligns
himself with the workers. In that sense Beyond Desire is
another of Anderson's stories of reJection and rebellion,
but here Anderson goes beyond the mystic reJection in his
early novels and in a manner much improved since he started
it in Eggg_flhi§§, he shows the evolution of the change
through Oliver's identification of himself with the mill
workers, and he carries it through to the outcome that seems
to him to be the only one possible during this time in which
he has so little hope for industrial America. In concept,
Anderson has moved forward in his handling of the novel form,
although other difficulties persist.

In addition to the story of Red Oliver, Anderson in-
cludes a section, Book Two, concerned with the mill girls

who had occupied so much of his attention during these years,

318

and then Book Three, the story of a small-town librarian
caught up in the mores of the Southern town, concluding
the novel with Book Four, "Beyond Desire," which again
focuses on Red Oliver and ties up the threads of narrative
and theme that have recurred throughout the novel. In
effect Anderson has attempted another Winesburg,.thg in
Beyond Desire, using four short novels rather than stories
and sketches as the main fabric of the book and giving as
in Winesburg,.ghig, the impression of a broad cross-section
of the social structure of the milltown. That this Winesburg
type of structure was his intent is revealed in a letter
written to his brother Karl while he was working on the
novel. The resulting structure of the book is not unsuccess-
ful. Rather, granting Anderson's intent to fictionalize the
revolution that he saw underway in the South, the scape and
organization of the book is in order because the structure
gives him the opportunity to range widely and utilize the
many diverse elements in Southern society.

‘ Book One, "Youth" is devoted primarily to portraying
the social background of the South, contrasting the ”few”
whom he had mentioned in the earlier letter with the many.

In doing so he shows the origins from whence this revolution
had sprung. The society includes three levels, the members
of the old Southern families who are long established, finan-
cially secure, and traditionally powerful in the community;

the newcomers from the North who, as supervisors and engineers,

319

are primarily concerned with getting cloth manufactured as
quickly, efficiently, and economically as possible; and at
the bottom the mill workers, poor whites from the town and
the hills. A middle ground between the few and the many is
almost nonexistent, and the negroes, comparatively few in
the mill town, are considered to be equally nonexistent,
exploited, and tolerated but ignored in spite of their often'
intimate relationships with the highest social level.

The rigid line between classes is illustrated by
Anderson's comments about the two baseball teams in the
town, the "town team" and the ”mill team.” They did not
play each other but played their counterparts.from other
towns. "For the town team to have played the mill boys
would have been almost like playing niggers."18 Against
that background, Red Oliver, son of the respected-town phy-
sician and a woman considered to be poor white trash by the
negroes, exposed to radical and revolutionary theory by
friends in the Northern college he had attended, and forced
into the mills by the death of his father, is faced with a
decision. Not quite belonging to the town group because of
his mother, yet suspected by the mill workers, he must
choose a team to play with because of his skill at the game
in high school. He chose the mill team, made up of his
mother's people, with whom he had begun to feel increasingly
sympathetic.

 

18Sherwood Anderson, Beyond Desire (New York, 1932),
49. ‘

I.

I.

 

 

320

In the background of this book Anderson introduces
the mills, the machines, the spector of advancing techno-
logy, and the girls who run the machines. Book Two, "Mill
Girls," is devoted to Doris Hoffman, the strongest of the
mill girls, and their natural leader. In effect she is a
symbolic portrayal of the monument in stone that he had
wanted to see erected as he mused about the mill girls at
the end of Nearer ghg‘ggagg'figggg. In this part of the
novel Anderson is at his best, combining his insight into
the workers with whom he always aligned himself and his
deep compassion for them. In this portrayal Doris is the
eternal symbolic mother, the product of the line reaching
through her immediate predecessor, Alice, in‘Aligg'agd‘ghg
Lost Novel, back to the earliest version in Windy McPhersonflg
§gg. But Doris, like Alice, is no longer inarticulate;
rather she has verbally as well as spiritually accepted
the responsibility for her weaker, less wise sister workers
and for the tiredness and emptiness that fill them.

Here, too, in this section, the shortest but the
' most directed and economically executed of all in the novel,
Anderson shows the background of the mill girl in her servi-
tude to the machines and her insecurity except insofar as
she can make herself indispensible by hard work, skill, and
efficiency. In one of the best passages in the book he
describes the girl's attempt to find diversion and relaxa-

tion at a fair. Coming so soon after Ag American County Fair,

321

it might be expected that there would be striking similarities,
that the same impulse that brought about the former work would
be seen at work in this, but the dissimilarity between the two
is almost shocking. In the former Anderson had shown the
spontaneity and depth of failing, the age-old celebration

of fertility, the closeness of the fair in spirit to the
earth from which its products and celebrants had sprung, but
this is a new sort of fair, a mechanical ovation to the in-
dustrial age, composed of machine-induced vicarious thrills,
the consumption almost as a rite of the machine-produced Coca
Colas and Milky Ways, and above all, penetrating to every cor-
ner of consciousness, the ballyhoo that is so much a part of
the machine age.

The fair, as Anderson remarks, "fed Doris Hoffman's
consciousness of worlds outside her own mill-bound world,"19
but it was merely an indication of the fact that the world
outside was an enlarged version of her own, dominated by
the machine, by the feverish desire to consume machine-made
products mechanically, by the spector of insecurity. ”The
fair was crowded and your shoes got dusty and the shows
were shabby and noisy but Doris didn't know that,”20.Ander-
son says; she, like so many others, felt that there was no

life possible other than the one she knew.

191nm. , 81. gonna.

322

Here, too, in this brief sketch Anderson shows the
unconscious efforts of the mill workers to inJect some
meaning into their lives. The fair is a fake and a bit of
opium thrust at them, but even that wears off and they have
nothing and know it. The only possibility they could see
was in the union; that, at least, might give them some
measure of control over their own lives, but organizing
was flying in the face of the power behind the machine, and
they were afraid, even as they were driven to it by the
emptiness of their lives. Nevertheless the union, as it
grew, filled.their emptiness with hope. Contrary to what
Irving Howe says, the section does belong in the book; it
provides the muted obligato that accompanies the song of
revolution that Anderson is directing toward its crescendo.
It is restrained, it is pointed, and it provides the key to
the theme of revolution.

Book Three, ”Ethel,” shifts the scene again to an-
other aspect of the revolution that Anderson was describing,
this time the efforts of a woman to free herself from the
rigid restraints of Southern convention as well as the
newer demands of the symbols of material success and to
assume in the name of humanity the leadership that Anderson
had pleaded for in Perhaps‘flgmgg. Ethel Long, like Red
Oliver, is a product of the old Southern mores, and like
him as she read and thought in her Job as librarian, she

had been exposed to the same new impulses of human equality,

323

fulfillment, and understanding that Red had experienced.
The many double standards of Southern life annoyed her:
the reverential attitude toward women held by Southern men
at the same time that the tan population increased; the
puritanism that made it the ”Bible Belt” at the same time
that it held out its arms to the ugly aspects of industrial-
ism; the social standards that made Red Oliver a lone figure,
hovering between the two extremes of Southern white civiliza-
tion. In Red she saw the symbol of hope for the South in a
blending of the two extremes, understanding and tempering
the beliefs of each while at the same time accepting the
best of each. But Red was unaware of her attitude toward
him, and they became friends as he came into the library in-
creasingly often, at first because he had nowhere else to go,
and then because he wanted to learn and books were the only
source of information and possible understanding in the town.
In the figure of Ethel's father Anderson constructs
an effective representation of the Old South that is moving
into the new. Having accepted the faith in the old ways
and beliefs that had been handed to him by his inheritance,
he went on to accept the new faith in industrialism that was
introduced to him by the clergy, the wealthy, and the estab-
lished, all authorities whom he knew and respected. In both
cases he was incapable of questioning; he could only accept.
Here, too, Anderson is sketching in the background of

the coming revolution in a portrayal that is neither unsympathetic

324

nor vindictive as might be expected. Rather it is an acknow-
ledgment of the man's point of view, a sympathetic understand-
ing of the paradox of his position, and a regret that the man
is not only incapable of questioning either the old gods or
the new, but beneath this inability, afraid to question them
even if he could. Here, Anderson implies, is the real tragedy
of the modern South, affecting political, economic, social, and
religious problems indiscriminately; it is the tragedy of re-
fusing to acknowledge that the problems exist. This is the
state of mind that Ethel Long, the librarian who is eager to
take up her position in the attempt to humanize society, is
struggling against.

Ethel's past had been a series of contradictions al-
most as complex on the personal level as that of the South on
a regional basis. She wanted wealth and position as the age
demanded and yet she didn't; she wanted the sexual freedom
that she saw was the prerogative of men, and yet she was
afraid of its brutality and sordidness; she wanted to live
the life of an intellectual and literary person, but she was
suspicious of the shallowness and superficiality of it when
she was introduced to it, so, having returned to Georgia,
her rebellion was resolved in taking the position as librarian,
a gesture that was considered daring for a girl of good family.
A flirtation with a scheming, unscrupulous, ungentlemanly
politician amused and flattered her, but she was drawn to

Red Oliver, and eventually, in spite of the discrepancy of

325

ten years in their ages, she had a brief affair with him.
Faced with the impossibility of going on with the affair
or of anything more growing out of it, in despair she
married the politician, not daring to think beyond the
marriage and yet seeing in him a reflection of a growing
force in the world and in the South.

In this section of the novel Anderson carries through
‘the observation made in Perhaps'flgmgn that the future of
America lies in its women, and he finds that it is invalid,
that women, even when they have the desire, the capabilities,
and the willingness, are unable to assume the reaponsibility
that he was so willing to give them. In Ethel Long's case,
the complications that society introduces, the sexual drive
that nature has provided, and the inability to force herself
into acceptance of a role that reJected freedom 223.22 be-
cause by its very nature it demanded the highest type of
servitude combine to show Anderson that his theory is doomed
to failure. In her reJection of Red Oliver, whom she might
have saved from the destructive forces around him, she has
only made the outcome of his struggle inevitable. Her de-
sires to be strong, to be responsible, and to be free are
too much for her, and the fears raised by her background and
the conflicts it raises in her are too much to overcome. In
despair she casts herself into the midst of the new brutality,

a move that can end only in her destruction as an individual.

 

wi‘wJ‘ A

 

326

That this is a confused section of the novel is in-
evitable, probably consciously so on Anderson's part, deal-
ing as he does with forces that are more complex than any
he has dealt with previously and that disprove for him the
hope that he saw for containment and control of the forces
of the machine age. But here Anderson is not a vicarious
participant; he reports the facts as he sees them as though
he has no stake in the outcome. His Job as country editor,
observer, and reporter is not to interpret or to hope or to
search out a happy ending; rather it is to describe the mani-
festations of the forces operating in American society whether
he understands them or not. That his prognosis is unfavorable
stems from his observations of both the manifestations and
the confusions that they bring about by their inherent para-
doxes.

Book Four, "Beyond Desire,” deals with the climax of
the worst war of all, carrying Red Oliver to the end that
has become inevitable for him. After his reJection by Ethel
he has begun to wander aimlessly through the South, and as
the section opens he awakens confused and then remembers
that he is in a strikers' camp where he had been mistaken
for an expected Communist leader and made welcome the night
before. Oliver's confusion persists, however, and he is un-
able to deny that he is a Communist or to affirm that he is
one, thereby reflecting the uncertainty that Anderson him-
self felt at this time. He thinks to himself:

327
”Perhaps I would like to be the thing you
think I am. I don't know. Anyway I'm not.

"If the thing you think I am is something
fine and brave, then I would like to be it.

”I want that: to be something fine and

Eiévgsopifi‘fmfiéofi‘v"; 3232 $513321?» 5i“

If that means to be a Communist, then Oliver, the
Andersonian hero, is willing, but Oliver, like his creator,
still doesn't know, and it is significant that the emphasis
here is not on economic or political beliefs but on rela-
tionshipsto pe0ple and to an ideal, essentially the same
attitude as the strikers have toward Communism, which they
see as an experience that is to free them physically Just as
their religious eXperiences are to free them spiritually.
Still, however, Oliver hasn't cleared his confusion; it is
further revealed in his efforts to rid himself of the haunt-
ing memory of Ethel Long. In the process, however, he remem-
bers that he had almost unconsciously revealed himself as a
Communist to a motorist who had given him a lift; later he
finds that the motorist has told the police that Red had
threatened him, and the police have been searching for him
as a dangerous young criminal. Still he is unable to make
up his mind, and he sees what is happening around him as the
fulfillment of Anderson's prophecy in Egggyflhigg.

There were new words, new ideas, striking on
the consciousness of people. The words themselves

___ _-

2libid.

I.

I.

 

 

328

bothered Red. "Communism, socialism, the bour-

geoisie, captialism, Karl Marx." The bitter,

long struggle that had to come...the war...that

was what it would be...between those who had

and those who couldn't get...There would be all

sorts of queer new alignments of people in life

...new alignments made, having to be made. In

the end every man and every woman, even the’

children, would have to line themselves up on

the one side or the other.22

Both Anderson and his hero knew the side that they were
on; in Harlan Miners Speak Anderson had made public his align-
ment, and Oliver had participated in a strike at his home-town
mill and had fled when it was broken. Red had seen the brutal-
ity on the Communist's side; "he had got Just enough of Com-
munism, its philosophy, to make him afraid. He was afraid and
at the same time fascinated. He might at any moment surrender,
become a Communist...He wanted to go. He didn't want to go."23
He knew that Communism meant the most brutal sort of war, and
yet he was afraid that there was nothing else.

This is the indecision and confusion that drew the
caustic comments of some critics at its appearance in 1932
Just as it drew those of Irving Howe. The earlier critics,
many of whom had "gone over" or thought they had or said
they had because it was stylish, have a position that is
understandable; Anderson was to them that most anachronistic
of political phenomena, a mugwump, but Howe, with the advant-

age of perspective, should have known better. Red Oliver is

22Ibid., 271. 23Ibid.

329

drifting, Just as the times themselves were drifting and
as countless thousands of young Americans were drifting
physically and intellectually, drawn toward Communism and
yet afraid.

This chapter, more than any other in the book, re-
flects the kaleidoscopic structure of the times, the in-
decisions, the search for a firm and promising hand in its
quick, vivid sketches of the workers, their backgrounds,
their fears, and their few hopes. Occasionally a doubt
comes through, almost in anguish: "'How do I know that I
give a damn for people in general, the generality of people
...their suffering? It may be all bunk?”24 But Anderson's
deep compassion as well as his often implied question answers
that: "'Oh, hell, it's true.[tha§7 those who are always
getting it in the neck are the nicest people. I wonder
why.'”25 In the end his hero, Red Oliver, gets it in the
neck also. In an encounter with the militia, led by a young
officer who is also one of the "nicest people,” Red steps
forward, still uncertain as to the label that should be
pinned on him, but certain of the side he is aligned with,
and he is shot dead. The question has been resolved; names
are not important, nor is political or social theory. Man's-3
willingness to act on the side of his sympathies is the only g"
ultimate determining factor in the struggle. /

 

eélaido. 312. 251bid., 293.

330

Beyond Desire is not a novel about Communism nor is
it a call to revolution. Rather it is a portrayal of a time,
place,vand combination of circumstances that gave rise to
more indecision and self-interrogation than any other in
American history with the exception of the Civil War. Ander-
son has attempted to cram all of this atmosphere and back-
ground into his novel, giving rise to the charges of form-
lessness, meandering, and introduction of irrelevancies that
have been leveled against it. But if the novel is formless
and confused, so were the times that produced it, and Ander-
son, as fascinated by the events and as naturally sympathetic
to those caught up in them as he was, has produced a novel
that, like Eggg‘flhyyg, as a social document is an accurate
reflection of the spirit of the age. when the novel is con-
sidered entirely as a work of literary art it is possible to
find evidence for the charges made against it. The material
Anderson was dealing with was too immediate for the refine-
ment of treatment that would be possible later. However,
the real value of the book lies in that immediacy rather
than in its artistry. It is closely related to the Journ-
alism of‘figllg Townsl. Anderson the townsman, secure in his
personal identity and in his place, has locked out at the
world, has reported what he has seen, and has mirrored
effectively the spirit of those observations; yet, canny
in his role, he has refused to permit himself to be labeled.

 

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331

Instead he is willing to be counted on the side of humanity,
Justice, and courage.

In Beyond Desire, as in gay and the later.Kit Brandon,
Anderson wrote another of his almost-good novels. In spite
of his earlier declaration that he was through with hurried
work and that he would take his time and ignore pressures,
this novel suffers both structurally and stylistically from
his desire to get it done and through the presses. Parts of
it are handled with care, resulting in writing as good as he
had ever done, especially in the portions dealing with the
mill girls, which for their economy, their artless grace, and
their intensity are reminiscent of Winesburg. Elsewhere, how-
ever, he has resorted to the Jerky rhythms that were condu-
cive to easy writing but not to smoothly-flowing writing, and
the novel suffers accordingly. As a result, development of
character through his usual intuitive approach is often in-
effectual and disappointing. His haste is partially under-
standable; he was finishing his first novel in seven years
and he saw it as the opportunity to restore his literary
reputation, but the haste was both.unnecessary and unwise.

While Beyond Desire was in the presses, Anderson
Joined the American delegation to the leftwing ”Woriis
Congress Against War,” which.met in Amsterdam.in August
and September of 1932. While Communist delegates were in
the majority, nevertheless Anderson was impressed‘by the

seeming harmony of the meeting, with people of all liberal

332

persuasions uniting in common activity against fascism and
war. Anderson made a brief speech on the problems of the
artist in America, but for the most part he remained in the
background, seeing in the gathering something of the mystic
unity that he had sought to portray in Marching Meg. As in
his novel, he failed to look beneath the surface harmony or
to read the adopted ”Manifest-War Congress Against the In-
perialist War" carefully enough to see how effectively Com--
munist domination had made the Congress an instrument of its
own ends rather than a common protest.

However, shortly after his return, his renewed faith
in his creative ability led him to start a never-finished
autobiographical work called.A B2 3 g; Egyg, parts of which
were later incorporated in the Memoirs; to put together a
new volume of short stories, Qggyh In yhg flggdg; and to work
on a stage version of Winesbugg, th2. At the same time his
relationship with Eleanor Copenhaver was moving steadily
toward marriage. As a result, his interest in the political
and economic scene began to wane temporarily, and the end of
his indecisive flirtation with the Communist Party dates from
this point. Perhaps he had taken a second, closer look at
the Manifesto he had previously accepted. Although Communist
sympathizers and reviewers had seen Bgyggg‘ygglgg as evidence
‘ of his conversion, they had failed to see his indecision which
was coming to an end. He had been counted on the side that he

felt to be right, he had participated as actively as a literary

333

figure might in the stirring times, and now he had refused
to take the easy way out, that of rebellion for the sake of

rebellion.

Having written to Tom Smith, his editor at Liveright,
that he was too much concerned with the individualist’s
point of view to accept the dogma of the Communist Party
although the philosOphy of Communism and of the individual
might at times coincide, he told Smith that he had decided
not to go over, and in a later series of letters to Russian
editors who had evidently wanted to exploit his interest
for prOpaganda purposes he made clear his point of interest
in the movement without personal acceptance of it. To the
editor of the Soviet Literary Gazette, who had criticized
his work as too much concerned with bourgeoisie psychology,'
he pointed out his own position:

America started out, apparently, with so much
to offer to the world. In making our offer to
the world we have apparently failed. We have
become as a people, rich in goods and too poor
in something else...For one thing, we as a
people do not know each other very well, do
not draw close together, and I myself, as a
writer, have wanted more than anything else
to make Americans, in the civilization in which
they are compelled to live now, better known to
each other.

I am not so sure that simple stories of human
beings, caught and held suspended in a civiliza-
tion, are not better material for the ultimate
revolution that must come here than anything
else I can do...I am not at all troubled over
what you are doing over there, although I ad-
mit that I am sometimes troubled a good deal
as to 20w I may make my own best contribution
here.2

 

26Letters, 268-269.

334

Almost immediately after this, as though to reiterate
his faith in his own simple little stories as vehicles to
bring about a better life, Anderson wrote "Brother Death,"
one of his best, for inclusion in thelggggh in the Woods
collection, and then, perhaps reassured by the foreshadowing
of the New Deal, he returned to concern with personal affairs,
experimenting with novels, traveling, and looking forward to
the publication of Death $31112 m, which, he was sure,
contained some of his best work. This occupied him from the
early fall of 1932 to late the following spring.

In the volume Qggyh in the Woods Anderson collected
the best of the short fiction that he had written during the
preceding several years, including the title story which re-
mains among his best work. In this book Anderson has for the
first time dispensed with the use of a foreword, preface,
introduction, or tone piece, preferring instead that the
works themselves be interpreted through their own literary
art rather than through the arbitrary intrusion of his own
comments. Perhaps he no longer felt the need for explaining
himself and his works as he had for so long; at any rate,
the decision was a wise one, resulting partially from his
annoyance at the cool critical reception accorded Beyond
Desire. He was sure that this book would more than compen-
sate both for the lack of financial success and for the blow
to his reputation, and a great deal of care went into its

preparation. ‘Not only did he change the order and content

335

of the volume after he had received the proofs, eliminating
several stories that he felt were unsatisfactory, but he
wrote ”Brother Death" for inclusion. The latter was, he
felt, "...one of the finest stories I've ever done, and I
even dare to say one Of the finest and most significant any-
one has ever done. Sounds cocky, doesn't it?"27

The comment was cocky, hardly a comment that would
be made by one desperately unsure of his creative powers and
fumbling uncertainly, as Irving Howe maintains Anderson was
at this time. Not only was the statement cocky, but it was
not far from the truth. "Brother Death" and "Death in the
Woods” are two of Anderson's best stories, ranking easily
with any of those in the earlier collections, and the volume
as a whole is evidence that he had reached his maturity in
sureness of style and execution in the short story form, of
which more will be said after a brief glimpse at the volume.

To give form to the book Anderson has again used a
framing technique, leading off with "Death in the Woods"
and concluding with ”Brother Death," both of which are com-
panion pieces in mood, theme, and setting, ostensibly deal-
ing again with the theme of initiation that has unfortunately
all too often been accepted as the essence of Anderson's best

stories.28 In the former story Anderson has used as a basis

27Letters, 278.

28See, for example, Lionel Trilling, The Liberal
Imagination (New York, 1953). 35-36, which provides much
of the basis for contemporary Anderson criticism.

336

an incident presumably from his own childhood, described at
length in.Tay: 'A Midwest Childhood. When expanded into a
-short story the incident moves beyond the more impact of
death upon an adolescent mind and becomes symbolic of the
universal inevitability both of death and of the modern
tendency to attempt to ignore it, to deny it, and failing
these, to misinterpret it.

The story is a simple one, told by an adolescent
narrator, and in it Anderson returns to the grotesque cast-
offs of society that have consistently been his people. The
story is that of the life and death of an old woman who is
exploited by her husband and son, both of whom are completely
brutal without the redeeming innocence of primitiveness, and
by the dogs that the men keep as extensions of themselves.
Beaten into perpetual silence by their fists and their domina-
tion, her main function is to scrape up food for both men and
dogs. One night, while returning from the village with meat
given her by a gruff but humane butcher, she set off through
the woods accompanied by the dogs. Tired, she sat down to
rest in a clearing in the snowy woods, and a day or two
later she was found naked and dead; the dogs had taken the
meat, tearing her clothes off in the process, but she was
untouched, and the tracks in the snow showed that the dogs
had circled around her in reversion to the savage instincts
that had been repressed in them.

In death she was young and beautiful to the boy who

337

look on; she was untouched by the years of beating and bully-
ing, as though death had erased the marks of her tragic life.
The boy always remembered the sight, but only in later years
did he come to know that she was one whom life had forced to
its lowest levels and made of her, even in death, a feeder of
animal life. Thus, as in Anderson's earlier stories dealing
with adolescent initiation, the story transcends that initial
basis and becomes a story of adult realization, of recognition
that death is inevitable but not terrible, that it can be and
should be a release from and a compensation for the brutality
and the lack of feeling that one encounters in life.

The story has been interpreted as a symbolic presenta-
tion of the life and death of Anderson's own mother, whom he
had earlier pictured as silent, inarticulate, and sent to her
early grave by hard work and selfless devotion, but the story
is too harsh and too brutal to be representative of the early
years that he had seen in perSpective as satisfying and rich
Just before writing this story. Furthermore, having re-
habilitated the image of his father Just before this, it
seems unlikely that Anderson would have returned to an image
that was as animalistic and as shadowy as the father in this.
Rather Anderson had chosen this stark, depersonalized pre-'
sentation not to symbolize family relations but to commemor-
ate the silent, welcome deaths that occur whenever man reduces
his relationships with his fellows to the level of the Jungle.

In "The Return" Anderson counters the grimness of the

338

preceding story with a return to the age of the machine and
to the realization that it had replaced the past that the
protagonist remembers. His only choice is to have the
machine carry him quickly away from the fears that the re-
alization brings on. "There She Is--She Is Taking Her Bath”
is a seemingly humorous piece that points out the inarticula-
tion of modern life and the folly that results when modern
man is afraid to let himself penetrate the surface barriers.
The humor disappears as the impotent protagonist realizes
that his fears will continue, that his hands will shake, and
that he will spill his desert.

"The Fight" is another story set in the present, an
attempt to point out the senselessness and the irrationality
that is at the heart of human rivalry and that no amount of
reason can change. Only a change in heart can do this, Ander-
son points out, an act of love that cannot be intellectualized.
"That Sophistication" carries this theme through to the bohemian,
avowedly modern revolt of the twenties, pointing out that de-
liberately intellectualized reJection is futile, that it re-
sults in a meaningless ritualized morass, as the naive heroine
utters a bit of unconscious wisdom: "I might have saved my.
husband all the money and got all this sophistication I'm
getting, or anyway all I needed, right in Chicago.29 Here

29Sherwood Anderson, Death In the Wbods (New York,
1933). 138.

4‘

1‘

 

 

339

again he emphasizes that changes in human relations can
only come about by something more far-reaching than merely-
willing them.

The other stories in the collection continue ex-
ploring other aspects of the futility of intellectualized
revolt. ”In a Strange Town” turns to the opposite side of
the preceding attempts to control the human experience
through rational action. These have failed, the wanderer
in this stery points out, because they have attempted to
analyze what cannot be analyzed. One can penetrate to the
core of human meaning only through empathy and through sin-
cerely approaching human lives and deaths as significant
extensions of one's self. The mountaineer Juror in "A Jury
Case" realizes this instinctively as he learns that there is
a difference between human truth and intellectualized legal
truth, while the middle-aged doctor in ”Another Wife" points
out that true feeling transcends things that can be seen,
felt, or measured. With true maturity comes wisdom in the
form of the realization that appearance, the only thing
upon which man can focus his intellectual powers, is un-
important and that human emotions, if they are true, perceive
this difference and penetrate through to the essence of other
lives. In "The Flood" Anderson portrays the scholar's in-
ability to define this ability of the human heart in spite
of the fact that he has experienced it and will again.

340

Through the stories in the collection Anderson has
been weaving a steady and progressive thematic thread,
stressing the inability of the human mind to determine the /
ultimate reality behind.appearance and events. This thread
runs from the apparent tragedy that is not a tragedy at all
in "Death in the WOods" through modern man’s ignorance of .
or fearful unwillingness to search for the meaning beneath \/
the surface of human life, whether it be the appearance of
change, of revolt, or of human relations. This, Anderson
points out, results in man's attempts to rationalize away
his insecurities even while he knows that he could find the
truth if he were not afraid. The theme reverses itself then,
turning to the positive side that, according to Anderson, con-
tains the key to any ultimate fulfillment of the potential
inherent in human life. This lies in reJecting attempts to
solve human problems through the rational methods of scienti-
fic analysis or of sense observation and attempting to build
relationships upon an instinctive, non-sensuous appreciation
of the fact that reality can be found only through the deter-
mined effort to enter into the lives of others. This, of
course, is contingent upon an appreciation not only of the
intrinsic worth of human life but also of death that, far
from being an intruder to be denied or deliberately misunder-
stood, is actually life's culmination and its final triumph.

This thematic thread leads directly to "Brother Death,"
the last story in the collection and the one that Anderson

341

wrote as a capstone in order to bring the theme full circle
by completely reversing the conventional roles of appearance
and reality. Significantly, this story, like the first one,
deals with a girl's realization that death can be life and
that life can be death, but again as in the first story,
that realization can only come with maturity. The story
actually has two plots, both of them centered within the
same family and each of them an amplification of the same
themes. The first plot concerns the young girl and her
younger brother who has a heart condition so serious that

it may result in death at any time. In an effort to pro-
long his life, the family determines to prevent him from in-
dulging in any physical activity. To the young girl this

is wrong, and finally her protests result in the boy's free-
dom. After a year or two he dies, quietly and peacefully,in
his sleep.

The second plot centers around the conflict between

the father and the oldest son, each of whom has definite
ideas about running the family farm. As a focal point for
the conflict, Anderson uses two huge oak trees, beautiful

and shady but useless, standing in the pasture. The father
wants to remove them, but the son protests. Eventually the
father has his way, and the son can only chose between
accepting the decision and protecting his position as heir
or leaving the farm. He remains, and in doing so he sur-

renders his individuality to the will of his father. In the

342

end the girl realizes, after she has lived and observed for
a long time, that the physical death of her younger brother
was more humane than the spiritual death suffered by the
older. Thus, the conventional roles have been reversed,

and to die is to preserve one's freedom while to live is to
give it up. Anderson concludes:

But while he lived, there was always, Mary
afterwards thought, a curious sense of freedom,
something that belonged to him that made it
good, a great happiness, to be with him. It
was, she finally thought, because having to
die his kind of death, he never had to make
the surrender his brother had made--to be sure
of possessions, success, his time to command--
would never have to face the more subtle and
terrible geath that had come to his older
brother.3
"Brother Death" was Anderson at his mature best, deal-

ing with a setting, a group of characters, and a plot that
contain in microcosm all that he had experienced in his long
observation of America, and here is the first indication that
he had at last recognized the basic problem that had cor-
rupted American civilization as a result of the rise of in-
dustrialism and materialism. It was the inability to distin-
guish between substance and dross and the all too frequent
'willingness to accept the cheaper substitute rather than to
search for the more valuable. This concept goes far beyond
his old belief in the age as one in which man lets himself

be deluded into believing that the standardized machineemade

 

3°Ibid., 297-298.

343

product is as satisfying as the one which resulted from a
combination of love, satisfaction, and the skilled hands
of a craftsman. Here Anderson points out that the same way
of taking the easy way out extends to the world of values
and that man has let himself be deluded into accepting
material values, the stuff of which appearance is made, in
place of the spiritual values of life itself.

Nowhere is this more evident than in an age that
denies the existence of physical death, hiding it behind
such euphemisms as "memorial park" or "slumber parlor,"
while it smothers sincere emotion and understanding in a
welter of maudlin grief and the overpowering smell of per-
fectly-arranged hothouse flowers. Death of the body, as
Anderson points out, is man's opportunity to triumph over
his environment, not because he will pass on to a perfect
state but because he no longer is faced with demands that
he surrender to it, whereas to live in compromise with the
prevailing standards of society is to place one's individual-
ism in danger and eventually to have it die. This is the
real death that society ignores even while it denies the
existence of the other, and this death could be prevented
while the other should be accepted as right.

This collection of stories contains Anderson's surest
and most perceptive comments on American civilization, stem-
ming as it does from the experiences of his entire life,

ranging from boyhood to retirement in the Virginia hills.

 

 

 

 

 

344

Coming at this time, as he was trying to find a solution to
the immense personal as well as economic problem that was
the depression, it represents his belief that a reversal of
American values was needed, that America had to look beyond
the immediate and below the surface of life in order to find
the belief that it needed so desperately if it were to sur-
vive. Too, the book marks Anderson's disenchantment with
another way of life, that of Communism, a way that, like
materialism of any other sort, makes the same sort of demands
on individualism in exchange for the same kind of things.
There was no easy, dogmatic answer to the problem of the
struggle between material and individual; an answer could
arise only from a re-examination of life and a rededication
to human principles, a process that Anderson himself had
struggled through and that now promised him a measure of
fulfillment.

The collection not only contains a mature statement
of belief, but it gives further indication of Anderson's
mastery of his craft. Always at his stylistic best in the
shorter forms, here again he reproduces the flat rhythms of
the American Midwest, and he constructs his stories in the
old oral tradition that behind its seeming formlessness is
carefully controlled so that the apparent digressions are
incorporated in their cumulative intensity into the climax
of the story. This technique, for which he alone is responsi-
ble, has been criticized as indicative of Anderson's

345

"compulsive, obsessive, repetitive quality which finally' J
impresses itself on us as his characteristic quality,"31
but such a criticism is best answered by Maxwell Geismar,
who states that ”Anderson gives us many examples of the.
pains that he took to develop this style, and the critics
who have stated that he wasn't really interested in good
writing are simply looking for another kind of writing."32
The literary influence of his reproduction of the Mid-
American idiom is further indication of the questionable
validity of such criticism. Through Hemingway it has come
to dominate much American fiction, although unfbrtunately
it has often been reduced to caricature by less able and
less conscientious followers.

The publication of Qgggh‘ln the Woods so soon after
Beyond Desire is refutation enough of the persistent criti-
cal complaint that Anderson had lost his creative powers.
Not only was Beyond Desire his most ambitious novel to this
point, but it ranked after‘gggg‘flhigg in effectiveness, and
of all his novels it is surpassed only by 222;.Ehiyg and
Li; Brandon. W I}; the M, immediately following is
his most consistent collection of stories if Winesburg,.gh;g
is excluded, and the two volumes together point out that
Anderson had learned to use the material that he had gathered
after he had had enough of .withdrawal and had re-entered the

 

31Trilling, 36. 32Geismar, 273.

346

world. Anderson's difficulty with critics at this point

was primarily that he had become stereotyped in the minds

of most critics and reviewers, and they saw in his works
what they assumed would be there or conversely did net find
what they had anticipated and consequently were disappointed.
The curious fact about the critical reception of each of
these books is that each critic seemed to be looking for
something different, although it was stylish to be contra-
dictory and condescending toward his work, an attitude that
had its inception with Hemingway's Torrents 2: Spring.

If there is a common core of the adverse criticism
leveled at Anderson at this time, it is mindlessness, the
failure to think his material through and to show its logi-
cal culmination. Such criticism was Justifiable when directed
against the novels of personal rebellion, but it was strangely
lacking. However, to direct it against either Bgygpg Desire
or 22.2.9.1 _Ip 1.113 319.222 is indicative of lack of critical per-
ception. Beyond Desire is politically inconclusive, but it
is not philosophically inconclusive as it points out that man
must identify himself with a side in the economic struggle
and act to support it. yppgh‘gpflphg'flppgg carries on from
this point and makes observations about the meaning of life
and death that not only are not mindless but are among Ander-
son's keenest.

The contrast between these two works does, however,

point out Anderson's real creative difficulty. It was not

347

in conception.of the works, but it was in execution. Not
only was he still at his best in the shorter forms as usual,
but since 2323 Laughter he had been having stylistic problems.
The shorter works, including ”Mill Girls" in Beyond Desire,
are in the Midwestern idioms and rhythms that he had first
used in Winesburg, but most of the novel is in the Jerky
experimental style that fascinated him to the detriment of
his work. This inability to recognize his own most effective
style is mindlessness of a sort, but it is concerned with
technique rather than conception, and the two should not be
confused.

With the conclusion of Dggphllp the Woods Anderson
had completed his re-entry both to the literary world and
to the world of intellectual and emotional concern with the
problems of the people who dominated his creative work. His
literary work was resumed with the same sort of accomplish-
ments and failures that had characterized it before his with-
drawal, and the world that he found outside the Virginia hills
had the same problem that resulted from dehumanizing factors
in society. His approach to both, however, was different.
In fiction, eSpecially in the novel, he sought to find mean- w
ing in the act of rebellion itself rather than to leap at an
easy answer, and he came to accept the view that to stand up
for one's beliefs, no matter what the cost, was to find pur-
pose. More importantly, he had accepted the belief that life
and death are not what they seem, and that life, by which he

 

348

means the personal integrity affirmed in Beyond Desire, is

 

the great adventure, while spiritual death is the denial of
individuality and humanity.

His view of the world was different also. Its problems
were not his personal problems; they were his as a man rather
than as an individual, and his attempts to find solutions to
them were not couched in individual terms but in terms that
were designed to find relief for all men. At the same time
his flirtation with Communism was brief because he had learned
that appearances and_promises are not reality, and that such
a system made demands and had results that often were at odds
with the promises and with his beliefs. He still sought to
find something that would provide the human feeling that his
Marching Mpg and "Commercial Democracy" concepts had sought,
but he knew that like them, Communism was too easy, too pat
to be true.

At this point Anderson was entering the last phase
both of his life and his career. He was about to marry
Eleanor COpenhaver, who was partially responsible for his
revewed attention to both his work and his world; he had five
more books to write, four of them concerned with his final
statements on the meaning of the American experience as he
had known it; and he was to find and support a movement that
promised to bring dignity to the individual instead of de-
manding that he sacrifice individuality for security. During
those last years the farm and the Virginia hills were to

349

provide a place where he could withdraw occasionally in order
to carry out his final role as townsman who looks at the world
and likes most of what he sees at the same time that he re-
vias his fight against the barriers that divide men and make

them less than human beings.

CHAPTER IX
THE TOWNSMAN AND THE WORLD

Through an unfortunate series of circumstances‘ppgpp
£9,3hp,flpggp_did nothing to revive Anderson's literary reputa-
tion among critics although it was one of his best books, and
from its publication until his death in 1941 his position in
American literature was anachronistic. To the critics of the
1930's, imbued as they were with a culture that saw meaning
only in violence and in the adherence to an ambiguous code of
defiance propagated by Hemingway and his followers, Anderson
was a failure because he sought meaning inherent in human re-
lations; to those critics who were unable or unwilling to
acknowledge Anderson's attempts to find an authentic American
Style, he was a failure because his writing was stylistically
different and therefore bad; and to the many academic critics
who found difficulty in categorizing his work it was ultimately
unsatisfactory. The combination of points of view was one that
Anderson could do nothing to combat, even if‘Qggph‘Ip‘ppp.flppgp
had been successful.

In two areas, however, during the 1930's Anderson
found a large measure of understanding, appreciation, and
acceptance. The first of these was in the academic community

which, traditionally conservative in accepting the modern

350

 

 

r.

 

 

 

351

artist, had finally discovered him, incorporating his work
in classroom anthologies and inviting him to participate in
academic writers'.workshops. The second was the political
area, in which the New Deal brought into prominence a great
many men who were spiritually close to Anderson and who
recognized that they were trying to do the same thing in
the socio-economic area that he was trying to do in the
literary. This latter factor was very important during
this last period of his life and career. Not only did it
provide much of the material about which he wrote, but it
made him a semi-official arm of New Deal policy during a
good portion of the time. In fact the trip to South America
upon which he died was one of the semi-official Jobs that he
had taken on.

Anderson's loss of his reputation among critics con-
tinued to hurt him up to the end, partially because he felt
that it was deserved because of difficulties in finishing a
number of proJects that he started, and partially because,
since he could only be himself and could not become another
member of the current cult of violence, there was nothing he
could do to gain the good will of critics and reviewers for
the popular literary Journals. Nevertheless, in spite of
this difficulty, Anderson's last years were happy. He knew

that he had done good work in the past, he was working cun-

scientiously if sporadically, and he felt that he still had

good work in him. At the same time he felt secure in the

352

print shop, on the farm, and in the purposeful travels of
those years. Most importantly, his last marriage was a
happy one.

M _I_n_ 3.132 M, which should have been one of
his most successful books, became a victim of the financial
instability of the times. While it was in the presses,
Anderson's publisher, Horace Liveright, failed, and the book
never reafly came out. Only a few copies had been bound and
sent to reviewers, and the remaining finished copies were
impounded during bankruptcy proceedings. Muchlater they
were sold to remainder houses. The book received little
critical attention, and even if it had been promoted, there
would have been no COpies available for sale. Consequently,
not only was there little of the financial return that Ander-
son would have welcomed, but there was little opportunity for
this book to provide rebuttal to those who saw Anderson's
literary career as finished. However, Anderson was accustomed
to such bad breaks by this time, and his only regret was ex-
pressed in a letter to Gertrude Stein later that year: '"I
wrote one good story last winter, in a book called 2333p Lg
3§£_Eggg§. I'd send the book on to you, only the publisher
went smash and I haven't any copies. The one story I liked

best was cafled "Brother Death."1

 

1Letters, 295.

353

The'most significant factor in Anderson's disregard
for the failure of his book was his forthcoming marriage to
Eleanor Cepenhaver, a marriage that held more promise of
lasting satisfaction and fulfillment than any of his pre-
vious marriages. Anderson had known Miss Copenhaver, a
Marion girl, since shortly after he had come there, and her
work for the Y.W.C.A. with mill girls and her interest in.
the Southern labor movement reflected her deep concern for
the people whom Anderson had been championing for most of
his creative life. In spite of a pronounced difference in
ages, they shared compelling interests and a compassion for
the people with whom both were so intimately involved. The
values that they had in common were a firm foundation for a
mutually satisfying and fulfilling relationship.

From Sherwood Anderson's standpoint, his relationship
with Eleanor was the most important in his life for several
reasons, as he pointed out in numerous letters, especially
in those to her father, who disapproved of their marriage.
When Anderson had found his way to Marion, Virginia, he had
retreated to the past, seeking a refuge from a society that
he could rebel against but could not understand. To Eleanor
he gave the credit for showing him that he should regard
Marion not as a place in which he could withdraw from the
world but one that he could use as a base of operations for
carrying on his search for the ultimate good that could be
found in America. It is impossible to determine fully the

354

influence that Eleanor had on the course of his work dur-
ing the years of their friendship, courtship, and marriage,
but the evidence points to the assumption that she provided
direction to him through her interest in working directly
with the people of the Southern industrial revolution and
coming to know and understand them. That Anderson was aware
of his debt to her is evident from many of his letters,
especially in the explanation of their relationship and of
himself that he wrote to her father, B. E. Capenhaver, Just
before their marriage in the summer of 1933. lie wrote:
As regards Eleanor and myself. We have known

each other a long time now. We began as friends

and then began to love each other. She has done

some wonderful things for me. When I first knew

her and we were but friends, I was almost alto-

gether a defeated man.

She gave me new courage, made me see myself,
I believe made me a workman again.2

More than this, however, Anderson indicates that his
long period of introspection had given him insight into what
had been driving him for so long and what had finally led
him to Marion, to Eleanor, and to a renewed confidence in
his own creative powers and in the people about whom he
wrote:

As men our two lives have been, I should say,
altogether different. I have taken great risks,
made mistakes you haven't made. In my own way,

I think, Mr. Cepenhaver, I have also been a God-

seeker. To be the kind of writer I have been

and am I had to take great risks of misunder-
standing. I thought that to understand men and

2Ibid., 289-290.

I‘

 

 

 

 

355
women, get at the inner secret of them, was
more important than to gloss over life.
I have been punished for that, misunder-

stood often. It is, I believe, partly, maybe

altogether, the secret of my failure in marri-

age. I have got in some places the reputation

of being what I am not, a sensual man.

On the other hand...I have got, by the course

I have taken, the love and loyalty, I believe,

of some of the finest men in America. On the

whole I can't apologize. In the end I will

stand on my work, and it is because Eleanor

has had a real sense of that always, has helped

me so much, has stood by me when I was dis-

couraged and defeated that I love her so much,

more than I ever thought I could love.

At this point Anderson was not a defeated man, nor
was his creative life over. Rather he was full of ideas
and proJects, not only for new creative work but also for
the direct action that he had learned was both necessary
and effective in dealing with the overall problems that
plagued America as a result of the economic collapse. Secure
in his own personal life and in his rediscovery of the Amer-
ica that he had forsaken for so long while he was exploring
both the agressively modern America of the twenties and the
American past, he turned again to the present. He had deter-
mined in Eleanor's company to rediscover the modern scene and
to find out what had happened to the American character as a
result of the depression. First, however, he took time to

put into form for publication a collection of some of his

3lbid., 290.

356

short, impressionistic pieces. The result, Np gygpg, is
another of the works that show Anderson's control of the
shorter forms, and it is another of his works deserving of
more attention than it has received.

EQԤEEQE is one of the limited distribution books
that Anderson wrote in Virginia, a collection of essays in
which he tried to incorporate as much of his thinking as he
considered to be worth preserving. Published by the Centaur
Press in 1934, it is primarily a tribute to the people who
have, without pretense, self-righteousness, or indignation,
tried to make the world a more meaningful place in which to
Alive and in the process have made Anderson's life richer as
they stimulated his mind and his emotions. In a sense the
book serves, as Maxwell Geismar has commented, as a preface
to the final stage of Anderson's life, not, however, as an
indication that Anderson is trying to point out the break-
down of "Industrial Separatism,"4 but because it marks his
withdrawal from the active combat and searching that have
characterized almost all of his personal and literary life
and into a phase that, in his last four books, is a summing
up and a final statement of his belief in the old truths and
in the enduring qualities of the human spirit. Ngflfigppk

bridges the gap between search and final affirmation; it

 

4Geismar, 274.

357

reflects the turmoil of the early depression years and the
vestiges of hOpe as the New Deal starts to function; and
more importantly, it reiterates his faith in humanity.

The book consists of a series of impressions, as
Anderson states in his introductory apology for the brief-
ness of the sketches and possible inaccuracies; these impres-
sions are not attempts to characterize the people with whom
he deals but to indicate their meaning to him and to the
world of which he has again become a part. Growing out of
the uncertainty and despair of the depression, Np S133; is
a tribute to what Anderson felt was worthwhile, and it is
part of his attempt to help people to know and understand each
other. In the title essay, devoted to Henry Wallace and the
spirit of the New Deal, he makes clear this belief in a revolu-
tion, not of force, but of humanizing impulses:

There is this desire among men, here in America
Just now, to like and understand each other. It
is a pretty dominant hunger among us. I can't
help feeling that this thing we are going through,
this depression, men and women hungry, suffering,
out of work, the Spiritual stress and strain of
all this...the old prosperous, proud, cock-sure
America in some queer way blown up, rows of star-

.ing blank-eyed factories in industrial towns,
Wall Street men who were but yesterday million-
aires now broke and knowing the common man's fear
of the future...there is or at least should be
some chance for something humanizing to grow out
of all this, and it is needed, for the successful
Americans of the past have been about the most
lonely people in the world. Individualism and
loneliness always go together.5

—
_—

6 SSherwood Anderson, 119 Swank (Philadelphia. 1934),
5.

358

Here is Anderson's real purpose in the book: to
break down some of the isolation that has concerned him so
long as a by-product of the American spirit that had been ’
taken over, exploited, and perverted by industrialism.

Here in.Np,§y§pk, as the title indicates, he is attempting
to break down the artificial barriers of pretense and show
the meaning intrinsic in the lives of these people who have
been misinterpreted or ignored by the public at large and
yet have gone on to find meaning, each in his own way.

In "Meeting Ring Lardner," the first of the essays,
he tries to reveal something of the essence of the man who
sought in public to take refuge behind a mask of indifference,
and yet who was possessed of a deep compassion behind that
mask, a compassion that was reflected in his friends' pro-
tective attitude toward him. For a moment Anderson reveals
Lardner with the mask gone, a shy man reaching out for under-
standing, before he passes on to "Death on a Winter Day," in
which he tries to recapture his friend Leon Bazalgette's
feeling for life in a tribute on his death.

"The Dreiser," another of his expressions of admira-
tion for Theodore Dreiser, is a study in contrasts, the
burly, outspoken man who knows he is right and sets out to
prove it; the browbeater who demands to be heard; and then
suddenly, inexplicably, the man who becomes ”like a shy and
very sensitivp boy”6 when he talks about life and its

 

6lbid., 16.

u

359

phenomena. Dreiser, he says, "...has the gift. It is rare
enough in this world. It is the gift or infinite tenderness,
always reaching out to the others."7 Like Lardner, he, too,
had had to adopt a mask, one that had nothing to do with his
real self.

From Dreiser he turns to "J. J. Lankes and his Wood-
cuts." He sees Lankes as a man whose real worth lies in "his
determination, his assertion and reassertion, as well as the
beauty of his work that...make Lankes...one of the very

"8 Then in "Two Irish-

significant living artists of our day.
men," a brief, moving tribute to Fred O'Brien and Maurice
Long, he recounts their hunger for an understanding of life.
"To George Borrow" and "Gertrude Stein" acknowledge literary
origins that, he feels, will go on and on, and "A Man's Mind"
and "Lawrence Again" reveal the adulation of a disciple for a
master who has done much to broaden men's understanding.
"Margaret Anderson: Read-Unreal" and "Paul" are tributes to
old friends, the latter being Paul Rosenfeld whom Anderson
had known so long and understood so infrequently. Here he
recaptures one of those moments.

The three most revealing essays in the book, however,
are "A Stonewall Jackson Man," "Lincoln Steffens Talks of

Russia," and "No Swank." The first is an obituary, reprinted

from one of his country newspapers, and in it Anderson has

 

71bid. 81bid., 28.

360

recaptured more of the essence of America and of the earlier
American crisis, the Civil War, than in any of his other
writings. Here is the defiance of the Rebel Yell, as strong
in defeat as it was in victory, and as enduring. The final
paragraph is a testament to nobody who was everybody:
Mr. George Sells was a sturdy American commoner,

a farmer. He worked hard all of his life on the

land. He acquired land, a strip of woods here, a

valley bottom piece there. He asked favors of no

man. He was a good neighbor. He died, at ninety-

three, August tenth, nineteen hundred and thirty-

four at the home of John Woods, in Grayson County,

Virginia.9

In effect, this is Andersons obituary of the passing
of the old life and the old ways of individualism, a way
that in its place was good, but that there was no more room
for in the new America that had perverted individualism into
an evil that had brought on a crisis more destructive than
that in which the first Rebel Yell had been raised. More
significantly than.this, however, Anderson has written an
obituary that goes beyond regret and compassion for the
passing of the individual and reaffirms his belief in the
intrinsic worth and the enduring spirit of man.

”Lincoln Steffens Talks of Russia" returns to the
present in a brief sketch that not only illuminates Steffen's
concern for humanity but gives insight into what Anderson

feels should be true after the revolution that he sees the

depression in America to be, a revolution not of political

91bid., 51.

361

or economic dogma, but of the way men treat each other. In
Russia, as Steffens told it and as Anderson understood it,
there was "...a sense of a people who in this confused time
feel they are building. They are not living in the past, but
in the future. Belief has come to them."10 This concept is
exciting and it is an ideal long held by Anderson; if it can
happen in Russia, he is all for it. People marching together
toward a new future, no longer alone, has been his dream since
Marching Men; perhaps now, out of chaos, it might become a
reality and inhumanity might disappear in a new sense of order,
purpose, and above all, faith.

"No Swank" illustrates Anderson's conversion to the
New Deal that resulted from the bloodless revolution at the
polls and to the hope for the future that he saw personified
in Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture and
the man whose dream it was to restore dignity to the rural
American countryside. Wallace, for Anderson, exemplified
the peculiar combination of Midwestern practicality and
American idealism that was necessary to resolve the American
crisis into what truly would be a.New Deal not only for the
farmer, who had been caught up in too much.individualism,
but for the American people as a whole. Here Anderson re-

affirms his faith, not in what Russia is trying to do, but

 

loIhid., 56-57.

362

in what America is going to do, what America, in men like

Wallace, is striving for:
It does look as though Russia would succeed
, at something. Apparently men in government in

Russia are succeeding in an effort to lift a

primitive agricultural people across at least

a century and to set them down in the midst of

industrialism. They may do it, but that isn't

our problem. Our problem is apparently to lift

a whole race of so-called individualists out of

individualism and into civilization. It will

take very sincere and human and civiliied men

of the Henry Wallace sort to do that.

As a whole, fig Swank, like so many of Anderson's other
short works is a direct eXpression of his point of view, and
at this crucial stage in his examination of the world that
seems to be crashing down around his refuge in Marion, Virginia,
it reflects strongly his sense at that time of death and of
hope. The air of death, of regret at the passing of the old
individualistic world is pervasive. He both understands the
old and knows its many values, but he knows that it has been
corrupted and must give way to the new, responsible age that
will be brought about by men who, like Wallace, have in them
that sense of dedication. Over the depression‘s aura of
death, then, Anderson projects another even stronger air of
hOpe. The countryside is still here, as are the old worth-
while values, and America has the men. Out of this crisis
that in reality is a failure and a purging of materialism,

something new and real may emerge. He is confident, but not

 

111bid.. 75-76.

 

353

blindly so, although it is a testament of faith as he con-
cludes, "Sometimes you have made me feel that we Americans
might-yet, in spite of hell and high water, be a people.
For they do Join you, cling, stick to you."12

As the product of the first real venture back into
the world, No Swank points out that Anderson has already
bridged the gap in his own mind between the human values of
the pastoral and humanistic collectivism that he saw small
town life to be and the needs of a nation that has let
selfish materialism bring it to the verge of destruction.
The apparent incongruity has been resolved, and to him the
New Deal is a native movement that is to bring into American
life a new awareness of and respect for the intrinsic worth
of human life. Like so many of his contemporaries, including
many of the movement‘s more active participants, Anderson saw
it as a revolution in the truest sense, an abrupt change in
men's thinking that would lead to a new America. The revolu-
tion was to be neither political nor economic; it was first
to be essentially spiritual, and then more superficial changes
would follow as they were needed.

Like most of his contemporaries Anderson did not antici-
pate the direction that the New Deal was to take. Like its
more sweeping counterpart in Russia, it did not become the
Spiritual revolution that he wanted it to be, but it remained

121bid., 130.

 

364

on the materialistic level because things are much easier
to manipulate than ideas and because ideals can often be
expressed only in terms of things. Consequently the move-
ment came to mean material security for more people, and it
has remained on that level, resulting in a broader base fer
the feverish consumption of shoddy products that Anderson
had deplored.

As literature HQ.§EEEE is unimportant. Too often
Anderson has used the fragmented style that marred his work
during the late twenties and early thirties, and the result
detracts from the evident deep feeling with which he approached
his material. However, in some of the essays, especially ”No
Swank," Anderson puts this technique aside occasionally and
reverts to the old natural style that is his best, and the
result not only has form but conveys the feeling that is
inherent in his approach.

On the whole N2_§wagk is a personal volume, one that
is important primarily for its insight into Anderson's inter-
pretation of men and their work. Consequently, at this stage
of Anderson's career, it is important because itzeflects his
increased concern with the world outside his town, it shows
that he is approaching a junction between his values and the
world in which he lives, and it provides the basis for his
final statement of affirmation.

Although Anderson had begun to see a way out of chaos
both for himself and for America, he could not rest with that,

 

365

nor could he return wholeheartedly to his role of story-
teller. At this time he attempted to work on an American
folk-opera, tentatively called The Mississippi, with Louis
Gruenberg, and on dramatizations of short stories, but
nevertheless he was unable to keep away from the main stream
of events long enough to do much with them. To Gertrude
Stein he wrote, "You ought now to have one big taste, square
meal of America again, don't you think?"13 and that was Just
what was in store for him a short time later when, after a
prolonged visit to Washington, he found himself caught up in
the contageous excitement of those times during which the
participants felt that something vital and significant was
happening in America and that they were bringing it about.
Anderson, of course, wanted to help; again he wanted to be
counted, but his finances were always precarious and after
his marriage they were even more so since he wanted to pro-
vide for his wife and was unable to.

Instead of serving without pay as he wanted to, he
accepted a commission from Raymond Moley, Braintruster and
editor of.ng§y, to travel through America. In a letter to
Holey on January 5, 1934, he set forth the scope of what he
wanted to do. It was another indication of his belief that
something big and worthwhile was taking place in America
and that he wanted to be in the middle of it:

 

13Letters, 296.

366

I would like to go to some of the C.C.C.

camps, this new venture, young boys, mostly

city boys, working in the forest. I would .

like to try to get the tone of some of these

camps, what this new out-of—doors life is doing

to these boys...The feeling in these camps and

the work being accomplished.

I would like to take a look at the Tennessee

Valley venture, Spend some time down there,

talking to men...I would like to revisit some

of the Southern cotton mill towns...[§fteg7

the coming of the NRA...under the New Deal.

I would really like now to take six weeks

or two months for a kind of roving venture,

looking and listeningh..[through7...the country

and the small towns.

Then, Anderson, conscious of his role of small town
editor and reporter to the nation rather than merely to
Smyth County, Virginia, went out into the American South
and Middle West to try to find out what was happening as a
result of this sudden infusion of new energy and belief, and
for two months he roamed the countryside, looking, listening,
and prodding the often inarticulate citizens into something
that often approached eloquence by the persistence of his
questions. He was getting the new square meal of America
that he had prescribed for Gertrude Stein. The result was
a series of articles in Toda , which grew into Puzzled
America, an account of rural and small town Americaas it
started the long struggle upward out of the ruin brought

about by materialism run wild.

 

14Ibid., 298-299.

357

Published in 1935, Puzzled America, like so many of
the other collections of shorter works, has unfortunately
been almost ignored by critics. Like Beyond Desire, it is
a record of a confused people in a confused time, some of
them hopeless, others resigned, even a scant few of them
optimistic, but all of them trying to grope their way out
of the social and economic debris resulting from the Crash.
That the book reflects a ”puzzled Sherwood Anderson,"15 as
Oscar Cargill comments, is true enough; as Anderson wrote
to Maxwell Perkins, in discussing the makeup of the book,
"...for a year or two, I did rather go over to something
like a Communist outlook. Now again I am rather uncertain
about all that. This attempting to touch off the lives of
human beings in relation to the world about them is much
more healthy for me. I have no solution."16

Obviously Anderson had intended no solution in Puzzled
America, and his puzzlement is not the bewilderment implied
by Cargill; rather, as the letter indicates, it is in Ander-
son's reflection of the relationship between the lives around
him and the world in which they are lived. The people them-
selves are puzzled in the early nineteen thirties, and the

book is in itself a statement of the point of view of the

people whom he knew as well as anyone else and much better

 

15 16

Cargill, 685. Letters, 307-308.

 

/‘

 

 

 

368

than those critics who are usually so remote from them. In
this book, more than any other of Anderson's last period,

the country editor is at work, interpreting the times and

the people for the benefit of his fellow townsmen and country-
men.

In introducing the collection Anderson summarizes the
observations he has made and the conclusions he has drawn from
them, and some of both are revealing, especially the one that
reflects more than any other the significance of his title:
"The amazing thing to the observer is that there is so very
little bitterness."17 Thus, the essential ingredient of
revolution is mission, and in its place is a bewilderment and
a sense of being deprived of long-held beliefs, not in Ameri-
can Democracy itself, but in the leaders it had produced. The
result is an observation that more than any other single factor
explains the overwhelming majorities that kept returning Frank-
lin Roosevelt to the White House:

We are the people who passed through the Werld

War and its aftermath. We saw the upflaring of

prosperity, lived through the Harding and the

Coolidge times. We got the hard-boiled boys and

the wise-crackers. We got, oh, so many new

millionaires. As a people we are now fed up

on it all.

We do not want cynicism. We want belief.
Can we find it in one another, in democracy,

in the leadership we are likely to get out of a
democracy?...If the leaders we, as a democracy--

 

17Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York,
1935). ix.

(‘

 

I.

 

 

369

and we are still a democracy, very much a

democracy--if the leaders we are now throwing

up into places of power do not lead along new

roads, if they fail us, the ailure will not

be due to a lack of belief.1

Here was the real power behind the jaunty, defiant
upthrust of the cigarette holder that became the symbol of
belief in the 1930's, and here, in one of Anderson's least-
known works is one of the clearest indications of the sure-
ness with which Anderson was capable of interpreting the
people whom the main stream of American life had left in a
backwater. Puzzled America is full of these observations?
that not only note'thexavages wrought by a half-century of
homage to pure materialism,"19 as Maxwell Geismar has noted,
but give further testimony to Anderson's faith in the geo-
graphy and the humanity that go together to make up his
America.

In the first section, "In the South," Anderson reiter-
ates his theme of the need for a controlling belief that
could serve as catalyst to start again the intimate, function-
ing relationship between human.and natural resources. "At
the Mine Mouth" he notes that "'There's power, lying asleep
here in this valley, to run half America',”20 and he sees a

new sense of identification between citizen and government

that indicates the seeds of the hoped-for belief: ”'We have

1?;pig., xv-xvi. l9Geismar, 276.

2OPuzzled America, 17.

 

370

got to get our union stronger before we can help the govern-

'"21 In a brief, sure sketch

ment take care of the chiselers.
Anderson makes this belief vivid in the personification of a
negro coal miner, who says, "'we have been like hogs rooting
in the woods for acorns...We have had our eyes on the ground
but now we are beginning to look up.'"22

”The Price of Aristocracy" looks at the abuses that
have been wrought on the South for so many years by an archaic
set of cherished beliefs that have for so long abused the land
and the majority of the people. However, Anderson sees growb
ing a new set of beliefs that look to identification with
other Americans and with a concerned and directed government
in place of the distorted notions of chivalry and of maudlin
self-pity that had occupied the Southern consciousness for so
long. More effective, however, than any other part of the
book is the section called "People," in which Anderson turns
to a series of brief personal sketches that catch the flavor
of this new search for a belief to replace the old ways in
the South.

In "A Rural Realist" Anderson introduces a new kind
of woman, a former weaver who "...had become an adventuress,
a pure gypsy type"23 as she sought something new, attaining

in the process, ”...a kind of air--no beauty, but something

attractive."24 In ”He Found His Racket," he portrays her

24

211mm, 8. 221mm, 20. 231mm, 42. Ibid.

371

male counterpart, a panhandler who doesn't mind too much
because he knows that "pretty soon” he'll go back to work

as an electrician. The vignettes continue: an old farmer
who lost his farm but wants to go back to ”'being useful,
making something grow, to feed people---"';25 the eagerness
and interest of a young C.C.C. worker aiding in archeological
excavations; the man who sees in T.V.A. "Something new in

26 a "feeling

American life..., and it mustit be stopped";
of men for men--desire to some day work for others"27 that
Anderson finds remarkably strong in America.

Thus the C.C.C. Camps, work in reforestation, reclama-
tion, and other conservation projects give Anderson a great
deal of hope for two reasOns. Not only are the ravages of
insatiable greed being rectified by a sane and worthwhile
government program, but the boys themselves are being re-
claimed:

The depression has given them their chance.

"Hurrah for the depression,” one of them said

to me. They are making a new kind of American

man out of the city boy in the woods, and they

are planning at least to begin tgamake a new

land with the help of such boys.

Throughout Anderson's observations of the South, the
two aspects of his observations are reiterated: that there
is both bewilderment and a renewed sense of hope that some-

one somewhere in government cares about them. In the tobacco

28

26Ibid., 65. 271pm. Ibid., 83.

251bid., 49.

372

country, a man defines the New Deal as meaning ”...that
people.have to to be made to quit cutting each other's
throats;"29 in an unemployed mill worker Anderson sees an
"undying so-American optimism"30 that borders on the pathetic;
in a Southern doctor he finds a compassion that transcends
that demanded by his calling; in "A Union Meeting" he ob-
serves the poor sharing with the poorer. There is hope as
well as hunger in the South, he notes as he turns toward the
agricultural breadbasket of the Upper Middle West.

The greedy exploitation that had ruined much of the
South was at work here, too, he noted. Farms were being
blown away even more rapidly than they were foreclosed, and
men alone were helpless to do anything about either. In-
stead they looked to each other and to Washington for the
help that they needed so deeperately and couldn't find in
the archaic myth of rugged individualism. Anderson epitomizes
this new belief in an encounter with a little old tramp printer
who distributes his own pamphlets setting forth the demand for
a new people-centered government. He reiterates it in the
portrait of a peOple who can danceewen through they are on
relief.

Further indication, if any is needed by this time, of
Anderson's rejection of the Communist solution is found in

a little corn town in the Middle West, when he reaffirms

2932—13—4... 970 Box-bide, 1100

373

both his faith and his hope in America and in a native
American way out of chaos. He states the need for a new
American belief that will enable man "'...to destroy only
what needs destroying and then to build, to make something
new--if we could find it as a real American impulse--some-
thing not imported, something that is our own.'“31 He con-
cludes that here in the heart of America he has found "...
this quiet determination, this patience, this persistent
belief that life in America can be made a good life for
Americans,"32 a belief that is echoed in the mining and mill
towns as well as the farms and county seats everywhere he
has visited. In his concluding essay, "The Return of the
Princess," he records the plea of a stranger to America, a
refugee noblewoman, whom he had encountered at Roosevelt's
inaugeration in 1933. In words not his own and yet that
express completely his own faith that the American ideal
that he has sought so long and in which he always believed
might yet be realized, he quotes the woman:

"You in America, in spite of all the desperate
position you may now be in, may bezgain what you
were. You were once the hope of the world, the
place to which the oppressed came. You may be it
again...There must be one strong land in the
world to which no dictator comes, to which the
creeping fear does not come."33

Puzzled America is a cross-section of America in the

midst of the most severe economic upheaval it has ever

31Ihid., 27o. 32Ihid. 33Ibid., 287.

374

experienced. Like Beyond Desire, it has a great deal of
value as a social document of the times, reaching out, as
it does, to the people in the grassroots rural and industrial
areas in the attempt to understand the predicament that they
are caught in and to describe it. The book has also gone
beyond that original intention and has become a renewed pro-
fession of faith, both by the people involved and by Anderson
himself, in the intrinsic ability of both the country and the
people to rise out of economic chaos. Just as they had made
a wilderness into a productive homeland, they believed that
they were going to construct a new, responsible governmental
framework that reflected accurately the needs, the hopes, and
the desires of the people. This is far from a cry for up-
heaval or for revolution, either by Anderson or by the grass-
roots spokesman, but it is a hope and a plea for the destruc-
tion of the perverted concepts of individualism that had re-
sulted in exploitation and in inevitable collapse. God was
remote under the old system and all too often the property of
the exploiters, they well knew, and they could not look to
Him. Instead, their only Opportunity for that hope and belief
to become reality was in exercising the democratic preroga-
tives and putting into power men who could and would trans-
late the dream into action and return dignity and self respect
to those who had been deprived of it.

The results of Anderson's accurate and unappreciated

interpretations of the times have become history: the symbol

375

of hope was a man who was willing to act, and the results

of his actions have changed the American scene to one that
would be unrecognized by William McKinley. The Wagner Act,
TVA, Social Security, and the countless alphabetical agencies
were the results of the fusion of democratic strength, Ameri-
can faith, and the leadership of a man who could transmute
dreams into actions. The combination gave Sherwood Anderson's
people much of the dignity and self respect that he sought for
them.

Puzzled America is not, of course, a prophetic book in
the sense that Anderson foresaw the specifics of the social
revolution of the 1930's that resulted in the realization of
many tangibles and a few ideals, although Anderson voiced the
demand for that change, and the voice that he made articulate
is a peculiarly American voice. Over and over again, with a
faith reminiscent of Hoover's belief that America was funda-
mentally sound, Anderson restates his belief that America it-
self is all right. But Hoover and Anderson were talking about
two different Americas. Hoover's faith was in the economic
structure that had rewarded him so liberally and that had
. engendered his faith in outmoded concepts of paternalism;
Anderson's faith was in the land and in the people and in
their ability to combine to produce a richer, more meaning-
ful world through the democratic process. Anderson's America

was one that had been forgotten by the Hoovers.

 

376

Puzzled America, like fiéllQ Towns! is ostensibly
journalism, but as Anderson had shown in the earlier book
that it was not necessary to stop with mere rote recitation
of fact, so here he applies the same approach to a much
larger scene. The result is a collection of sketches of
the people as he found them, sketches that take these people
out of the realm of journalistic subject matter and make
them representative of the spirit of America in a way that
borders on a new kind of folklore, a folklore of faith in-
stead of bluster and humility instead of pride. In doing so,
Anderson points out that there are not many Americas--rural
America, industrial America, Southern America, Midwestern
America, and all the other apparent dichotomies--but there is
one, which he depicts in this volume. Out of the basic unity
beneath apparent diversity Anderson makes clear the theme of
the book: a people's search for faith.

Although the book was a financial failure, neverthe-
less it contains Anderson's best journalistic writings, some
of which are worthy of much wider dissemination. In this
volume as in Hellg_Towns! he attempts to transcend the
immediate and to show the universal implications of his
subject matter. In doing so he has returned to the old
Winesburg style, joining it with his intuitive approach to
understanding the people, and he has been largely successful.
Unfortunately the depression subject matter limits its appeal
in spite of the fact that it shows what journalism can be.

377

In effect Puzzled America marks another of Anderson's
rejections, this time of any alien politico-economic struc-
ture, including Communism. After his return to the security
and meaningfulness of the American past that he had redis-
covered in rural Virginia the economic collapse had momen-
tarily drawn him back into active combat against the material-
ism of the outside world, and after weathering the temptations
of Marx's panacea, he has returned, as Puzzled America shows,
to his belief in the same old values that had drawn him to
Virginia.

During the remaining six years of his life Anderson
lived much more quietly than he ever had before. Happily
married and feeling secure in that aspect of his emotional
life, he spent most of his time at Ripshin Farm, leaving it
only for winter trips farther south and to Mexico and for
visits to old friends. In December 1934, he expressed some-
thing of his renewed faith.in a letter to Ralph Church:

I get a good deal from nature down here, and

it may be that I should have been a painter. It

is a very beautiful country I have got into here,

and I keep going to certain spots I've picked out,

a little, I guess as one might go to church. I

never could get anything from places--churches,

etc.--where people were engaged in the garrupt
business of trying to save their souls.

During this period, after Puzzled America had been

essentially‘completed, Anderson worked with Jasper Deeter

of the Hedgerow Theatre, an experimental group in Pennsylvania,

 

34Letters, 309.

378

on a dramatic version of Winesburg, Ohio which, when Deeters
produced it, was successful. However, Broadway was not
interested; the age demanded lighter fare. Although it was
a good adaptation when staged, nevertheless, the power that
marked the original version was nut the sort of thing that
could be transferred successfully to another medium, and the
dramatic version as a result was inferior to the book.
Meanwhile Anderson's mind was full of other creative
projects at this time, most of them dramatic adaptations,
from Dark Laughter, from Marching Men (in which he wrote to
Roger Sergel that he was fascinated by the effects that might
be had by sound experimentation), and in a play thematically
close to Poor White, which he had tentatively entitled.§hgy
§Q§ll,§§,§ggg.35 Also the Civil War and Lincoln continued
to play a large part in his preoccupation with the American
ability to rise above crisis, and he continued to read every-
thing on the subject that he could find, planning eventually
to use the material in a study that would, he hOped, epitomize
the American story. Of this unrealized dream, a fragment
exists, possibly written as early as 1924 (not 1925, as Paul
Rosenfeld say836) and unpublished until Rosenfeld's Reader
appeared in 1947. It is unfortunate that this project, which

 

35Several of these were collected in Plays: Winesburg
and others (New York, 1937).

36Rosenfeld, Reader, xxviii.

379

was based on a life that he saw as the essence of American
life, was never finished, perhaps because he was too closely
identified with it in his own mind. At any rate, in the
summer of 1935, he began sustained work on his last novel,
.Eit Brandon, an effort that he found trying, as his letters
of the period indicate. Nevertheless he finished it, al-
though his mind was preoccupied with his Civil War project,
and it was published in late 1936.

Kit Brandon is a combination of solid Anderson writing
and of hurried, almost frenzied prose that seems to indicate
Anderson's desire to put the thing on paper and get it over
with. Growing out of Anderson's continued interest in the
southern mountain girl and the strength he saw in her as well
as out of the widespread bootlegging industry in the Virginia
hills, Anderson attempted to fuse the two into a novel that
would provide for all time his monument to both the mountain
girl and her embodiment of the realistic environment from
which she came. He almost succeeded, and there are many
indications that had he been as absorbed in this novel as
he was in some of the earlier ones, he would have written
his best novel. In many ways it remains close to his best
although it is well below the level of his collections of
shorter works.

Anderson's approach to 5;; Brandon is a technique
that he had never used before: he put himself into the

novel as a sympathetic listener to whom Kit tells her story.

380

Partially as a result of this effort to act out in his
fiction the role of observer—interpreter-storyteller that
he had accepted, and partially as a result of a carefully-
controlled objectivity, the novel is the best constructed of
any of Anderson's works. The subject matter, too, is such
that Anderson can feel deeply sympathetic with the people
and yet, as with the miners and weavers he wrote about in
Puzzled America, remain sufficiently detached so that he can
see them as human beings rather than as extensions of himself
or as objects of pity. These factors combine to produce
Anderson's only major fictional attempt to interpret the
strength and the individualism of the Southern hill people
among whom he found so much to admire and to regret.

Kit was a mOuntain girl, a product of the sort of
brutal innocence that Anderson had been concerned with since
Winesburg and that he had rediscovered in the Southern hills.
Like so many of the other hill families, hers found it more
convenient and more profitable to measure its corn in gallons
rather than bushels in a tradition that is older than the
United States. Her father was a man who had theability to
go far had he had the opportunity; her mother was a nonentity.
At fifteen Kit bore all the responsibility for such a home
as they had; she served as lookout while the moon was cook-
ing; and at sixteen, like so many of the other hill girls,
she ran off to get a job in the mills.

381

After several years, during which she had been
helped in reading by a sympathetic woman whom she had met
in a library, she got a job in a store, where she met Gordon
Halsey, the wealthy but weak son of a highly successful boot-
legger. Kit provided the strength that Gordon lacked, but
after their marriage their relationship deteriorated, while
Kit, at first for the thrill but later primarily for the
material returns, became a highly-successful runner and decoy
for the gang's operations. As she became increasingly notori-
ous both adventure and desire for things paled, and eventually
she found that it was not worthwhile. Meeting a young man
crippled in the war who helped her elude the police, she
wanted to know and help him, but realizing that more than a
casual relationship would be impossible, she slipped off into
the night.' She had learned that there are more important
things in life than money and adventure, and that somewhere,
somehow she might find "some one other puzzled and baffled
young one with whom she could make a real partnership in
living."37

Such is the bare plot outline of the book. Such a
superficial sketch gives the impression that Anderson was
striving for sensationalism of the type that came into pro-
minence with the hard-boiled novels of the 1930's, but this
is far from the truth. The novel is not concerned with

happenings, sensational or not, but it is concerned with the

 

37Sherwood Anderson, Kit Brandon (New York, 1936), 373.

382

people and the land in the South that by now Anderson had
assimilated as thoroughly as he had his native Ohio. In

the process of assimilation he had learned that rural Ohio
and rural Virginia were for all practical purposes identical.

In many reSpects Kit Brandon parallels Poor White in

 

theme in spite of the differences in style and approach.
Poor White is the record of the growth of materialism around
a naive and innOcent Hugh McVey, who remains untouched by it
until he is almost submerged in it, while the later novel
deals with a girl who maintains her innocence, like Hugh,
until she, too, recognizes that the material things and the
adventure she sought are meaningless. Thus, the theme with
which Anderson is dealing is an old one, not only as far as
his own work is concerned, but as far as human activity it-
self is concerned. Three times Anderson had the opportunity
to face evil and know it for what it was, in industrialism,
in so-called modern emancipation, in both of which he was
himself intimately involved, and finally as an observer of
the chaos and physical suffering resulting from individualism
and materialism run wild. The first two produced the earlier,
semi-autobiographical novels, while the third, carefully-
controlled by Anderson's consciousness of his new role, re-
sulted in Kit Brandon, a symbolic interpretation of what he
observed. In this sense §;t_Brandon is as much the biography

of an era as Poor White.

Into the novel Anderson has poured the knowledge of

383

rural America that he had gained from almost a half century
of wandering and feeling the pulse of the whole mid section
of the continent. In addition to that knowledge he has
utilized the ten years of learning to interpret meanings
and values, not as a man trying to probe his own psyche but
as a man trying to understand the relationship between his
times and the people who lived in it. Finally, in this
novel, he has made his mature statement of the meaning of
that relationship, and having completed it, he gave his final
answer to the problem he had been trying to solve for so long.
The first significant factor that Anderson establishes
in the novel is the sense of place, a reproduction of physical
environment that is firmer and surer than anything he has
previously done. Here he portrays the origin in fact of the
two-headed monster of individualism and materialism that had
come to dominate the American scene. In the hard, uncertain
life of primitive America, the time of the brutal innocence
that had fascinated Anderson for so long, there was only one
way that a man or woman could rise, and that was by the
strength of his own two hands and by the cunning of his own
mind. Also in such a life the only way that success could
be measured was by the things accumulated in the process.
Anderson had obtained the evidence for this deduction a long
time before, as shown as early as in Windy McPherson'g,§gn,
but in‘Kit Brandon for the first time he draws the conclusion

that American materialism is the logical result of the

384

circumstances under which America was built. In this novel
he portrays the cause and effect sequence for the first time,
showing the strengths that might have resulted in a different,
a kinder and more understanding America had its original
impetus been less brutal and less concerned with the physical
things that had to be done. He writes:

Kit said, ”I don't care. I think if my father--
if he had been born different, in a different place,
had got him a different wife--" She was implying
that there was something tg be said. "If he'd even
had the chance I've had."3

Later, in describing Kit herself he amplifies this con-
cept of the origin of American materialism and individualism
when he describes the self-centeredness that stemmed from her
background:

She went smiling off into one of her side
talks, away from her own story, speaking of the
great numbers of people there were in the world
you had to just let go to hell, she said, not
counting on them, using them where and when you
could. She had got, out of her living, a phi-
losophy common enough to a certain kind of
Americans, for the most part successful ones.
More than once during my acquaintance with her
I thought of Kit that she might, under other
circumstances, have been one of our successful
ones, another Rockefeller, a Harriman, a
Gould.39

Anderson writes of this growth of modern American
brutality without regret or indignation as he had done
earlier, but in his description of its origins there is

a new note of acceptance following its understanding. It

381bid., 7. 39Ibid., 8.

385

is especially significant that in this novel the central
figure never attains this realization just as the protagon-
ists in the earlier novels had not. Rather the closest that
Kit comes to realizing that she must struggle against a cul-
tural accumulation of more than two hundred years is the same
kind of instinctive feeling that Sam McPherson, Hugh McVey,
and the others had that there were values to be found in
human intercourse rather than in things, and she, like them,
could only move fumblingly to seek them.

Full understanding of the cultural phenomena that led
to Kit's predicament was reserved to Anderson who, as inter-
ested and sympathetic bystander, could only hope that someday
she would be able to accept the America that is and that both
she and America would muddle through to a new appreciation of
human worth. Here is the real meaning of Anderson's comment
that in a single valley was locked the power to run half of
America. It is the human power, properly directed, that will
set up the course out of materialism and propel it into a
social structure based on human values. This cannot be
arbitrarily explained or dictated, he implies; as he wrote
to Max Perkins, he had no answers except a faith that somehow
the democratic process, properly directed by men who had a
vision of human worth, might bring about that new, meaningful
society.

In symbolically portraying the growth of modern

American pragmatism in the novel, Anderson has gone beyond

386

the recognition of its origins, however, and has shown
especially clearly the relationship between man and his
impersonal environment in the relationship between Kit and
the automobiles she drives. Then, passing beyond this, he
shows the sterility in modern life that makes such a rela-
tionship necessary. Human intercourse, he points out, was
impossible, not only for Kit but for almost all of the people
with whom she came into contact, and this was true for a number
of reasons. In the first place the barriers that prevent the
communication he had sought for so long are made up of things,
he finally recognizes. On the lowest levels these things are
the elements of food, clothing, and shelter that are necessary
to human existence. In a competitive situation in which not
enough of’them are available or released for general con-
sumption, the result can be and often is jungle warfare or
fratricide unless man learns to submerge his own interests

in those of the common good. This is what Anderson hoped
would result from the union movement, with which Kit was in
sympathy. Yet, with her shrewd and sceptical insight into
the aspects of the savage side of human nature, she was highly
suspicious of such movements.

On the higher levels thisbarrier of things is that
errected by status symbols. Not only are the symbols them-
selves barriers between groups and individuals, but the drive
to accumulate them results in the view of human beings as

Pawns to be manipulated. This view results in a spiritual

387

barrier that is even more difficult to remove. The outcome

of the resulting isolation is sterility in human relations,

symbolized in the novel both by the perfunctory and finally

empty marriage that Kit had contracted and by her continued

childlessness in spite of the numerous affairs that she had.
For her, sex, the most intimate of human relations, had be-
come a bargaining point in the struggle for things.

As a result of her sterility and her isolation from
her fellow men, Kit became the personification of modern man
in her relationship with the automobiles that she drove on
her booze-delivering expeditions. The cars became part of
her, subject to her domination and her skill, and she found
in her driving the completely attuned and coordinated rela-
tionship that she failed to find with human beings. Her
relationship with cars is not compensation for her inability
to assume the male sexual role as Freudian interpretation
would have it, although Anderson has commented on the phe-
nomenOn he had noted of girl machine operators rejecting
their male counterparts and dedicating themselves almost
religiously to the service of the machine. Rather it is the
result of the universal sterility in a machine and thing
dominated culture in which the only predictable and endur-
ing relationship possible is one between man and the new god
that he has created. Thus Kit knew her care intimately and
had absorbed them until they merged into her being; as a
result she found an extension of herself that she couldn't

find in her relationships with others.

 

388

There are other factors in the novel indicativecf
Anderson's grasp of the meaning of American existence, among
them the setting in time that he has selected and the ulti-
mate meaning of the passage in which a tubercular young mill
worker demonstrates his ability to transpose himself into a
horse or a bear while walking on all fours.40 The signifi-
cance of the former lies in its predepression and prohibition
setting, selected primarily because at the Coolidge-Hoover
peak of materialistic prosperity, Kit is the epitome of the
adman-preacher's gOSpel of material accumulation and consump-
tion brought to its logical conclusion and turned into an
anti-social, anti-legal nightmare. Things are needed in order
to belong under the new order, the admen proclaim without
saying how they should be acquired, and the lawbreakers are
merely pursuing that material ideal as quickly and efficiently
as the admen demand.

In addition to Anderson's choice of this particular
phase of America's economic history as part of the chronologi-
cal setting, the prohibition-bootlegging background is also
important. Prohibition was the last concentrated and direct
effort of a puritan minority to impose its will on the Ameri-
can majority, giving rise to a so-called "noble experiment"

that was designed to appeal both to the idealistic and to

 

40Reprinted in The Reader, pp. 663-678, as "Bud

(As Kit Saw Him)."

389

the practical. To the former, it was explained as an oppor-
tunity to usher in a new, clear-headed era free from poverty
and crime, and to the latter as an opportunity to rid the
nation of a distracting influence so that it could devote its
attention to its proper business of business. A good many
Americans, Sherwood Anderson among them, knew that both of
these claims were nonsense. As Anderson had shown, drink was
as much a blessing as a curse to the imprisoned people on the
levels he had dealt with in Horses and Men, just as he knew
that nothing, not even the individualism and industrialism
that he decried, was bad in itself.

More significant than this, however, is the fact that
Anderson has employed the bootlegging background in an ironic
sense: those who profited the most by it and hence were
accumulating the material things that the new system said
were good were also doing the most to undermine the legal
and ethical code that made the system possible. Also the
puritans who advocated prohibition were placing their own
lives in jeopardy through the resulting lawlessness. Thus
Anderson points out that both materialism and puritanism
carry the seeds of their own destruction.

In the passage describing the young mill worker's
ability to transform himselfinto a bear or a horse by
strapping leather hooves on his hands and prancing on all
fours, Anderson returns to the peak of his interpretive

powers. In this passage he expresses man's eagerness to

 

390

break through the shells of flesh and convention and make
himself both more and less than he is by entering into the
lives of animals that have the integrity and beauty denied
to man. Here, as graphically portrayed as in "Hands,” Ander-
son symbolizes man's impotence and frustration when he tries
to communicate his own wants and needs to his fellows.

In concept, in execution, and in scOpe, Kit Brandon
is more complex and more evocative of subtlties of meaning
than any of Anderson's other novels. It represents Anderson's
final appraisal of the ultimate meaning of American civiliza-
tion, its origins, and its ultimate destiny, couched in a
logically arrayed structure of symbols that represent the
whole of America in a small, seemingly isolated segment of
it. The novel might have been one of the best of its time
had it not been marred by mechanical and structural diffie-
culties such as grammatical lapses and transitional dis-
ruptions that are annoying, sepecially because they could
have been eliminated so easily had Anderson wanted to. Un-
fortunately, as Roger Sergel, who was visiting Anderson when
the proofs arrived at Ripshin Farm, points out, Anderson
disregarded them as though he was through with the novel
forever; the proofs were returned uncorrected,#1 and the
flaws remain to detract from the effectiveness of what could

have been his best novel.

41Schevill, 318.

391

Anderson seems to have been aware even while he was
writing it that Kit Brandon would be his last effort at a
major work. In spite of his continued interest in the Civil
War, he dropped his plans to write his interpretation of it,
and although he was disappointed at the reception and sales
of,§i§ Brandon, he really wasn't concerned about them. Rather
his last four years were probably the happiest of his life;
his ideological battles had been fought and won, as he pointed
out in a letter written to Paul Rosenfeld but never sent;42
his marriage to Eleanor Copenhaver was both happy and stimulat-
ing, and his family was nearby, Robert running the papers, John
assisting him and painting, and his daughter and her husband
running a country paper in North Carolina. Ripshin Farm,
which he fortunately had not sold, became the refuge and base
that he originally intended, and excursionS'following the sun
were only interludes away from what had become his home.

Anderson was far from idle, and he maintained his
active interest and participation in political, economic,
and especially artistic affairs during these years. He worked
on what he called Rudolph'_s_ _B_c_>_o_k _o_f Days, a work that eventu-
ally became the Memoirs; he continued his new interest in
the theatre; he devoted much attention to the Spanish Civil

War, lending his name to numerous anti-Fascist organizations,

and writing, ”It is...the one thing I would go to any lengths

4QLetters, 358-361. AnderSon noted on it, "Not sent.
Too smug.

392

for, to defeat dictatorship, either Communist or Fascist,"43
Preparing his plays for publication occupied some of his
attention in 1937, and his interests in the machine age con-1
tinued, even to the point where he anticipated the post-
World War II "do it yourself" mania, writing in 1937 that
"...there is an interesting development. In this town, for
example, I know six or eight men, lawyers, doctors, and
businessmen, who have set up workshops in their houses.

"44

They are trying to make things... Was this a new attempt

to achieve fulfillment through craftsmanship or was it another
form of obeisance to the industrial god? He wasn't sure, but
he marked the phenomenon for watching. If his attitude seems
vacillating and undirected during this time, a letter to Roger
Sergel goes far to eXplain the attitude of a man of sixty at
the end of a career:

I got the copy of the magazine put out by the
University of Chicago students and certainly
understand Chris's interest, but as for writing
something that they might want, I am a little
doubtful.

The trouble is, Roger, that I am no longer
young. I certainly sympathize with and admire
the enthusiasm and determination of Chris and
his friends, but as to just where they are go-
ing, or where any of us is going, I have these
dreadful times of doubt. As you get older,
and perhaps a bit more sophisticated, you are
eternally asking yourself questions that can
not be answered. The truth is that we are

 

43Ibid., 364.

393

probably all headed for something, but whether

it will be better or worse than what we have I

don't know...

The great difficulty with me in all this

matter of going somewhere is that I am not

terribly interested in arriving. My chief

iiiiieié :Sbfiiafiefiiffiii‘iniitfig ”a3" and this

The truth is that Anderson was tired, that he felt
his work of recording what had happened on his way was over,
and that he was happy and secure in his personal life. In-
creasingly during these years his attention was devoted to
the place and purpose of the artist in society, an old
interest again revived, rather than in the creative act it-
self. Writing and revising had taken such a toll of nervous
as well as physical energy during the writing of Kit Brandon
that he was reluctant to go through the experience again for
any sustained time. The other interests, especially that of
the position of the artist, absorbed the same sort of drive
and attention that Anderson had devoted to his writing, and
he remained happy. The difficulties that he was having with
critics and finances annoyed him, however, on the occasions
that they were called to his attention. Somewhat testily
and yet with characteristic honesty he expressed his views
on this matter in late 1937 in a letter to John Paul Cullen:

I think I should write you at once to get some-

thing straightened out. It is about my getting it
in the neck. You are all wrong there...It's true

451bid., 378.

394

that among American writers who have got a
lot of attention I've probably made less
money than any of them. Well, what of it?
I haven't found that the ones who have made
a lot of dough have got much fun out of it.

You see...I have had and am having a damn
good life. In some way I have managed to
sleep pretty well, have loved some damn fine
women, wear good enough clothes, have always
had a roof over my head.

People...come along and do swell things
for me. In my wanderings I've probably covered
more of the country than most men. I have
known, pretty intimately, practically all the
outstanding men in the arts in my time.

It has been a damned good life for me. It
is right now. I might very well have got it
in the neck a hundred times worse by being a
big popular success. People do pretty nasty
things to successful men. Don't go wrong on
that...

I just wanted to get this clear with you...1‘t6

Returning sporadically to creative work, Anderson
started a novel called Hg! Eyegn Egg Gyggg in 1937, and then
another, Brother Qagl.47 Later he started 8.2222 Spring, re-
cast it and retitled it Men and Their Women, and then abandoned
it, all within a few months in 1938, as though in tacit ad-
mission that sustained creative effort was too much for him.
Then he took up his intermittent work on the Mgmgigg and

later on the essay that grew into Home Town. His name

 

45ibid., 391-392.

47Based on his brother's life, it was primarily a
tribute and an effort to clarify their relationship rather
than a serious attempt at a novel.

395

appeared in connection with more and more anti-Fascist and
anti-totalitarian organizations, and as a result of his
interest in young writers he appeared at the writers' Con-
ference at the University of Colorado, at Olivet College
in Michigan, and at Antioch College in Ohio.

At Olivet his principal contribution was a lecture
entitled A Writer'g Conception g; Realism, in which he spoke
more of himself and his philosophy of life than he did of
writing. Here, almost at the end of his active writing career
and of his life he reiterates certain beliefs about himself:
"It must be that I am an uncurable small town man;"48 about
the state of the world: "The old human interest of one man
in another seems to have got lost somewhere;"49 and about
writing: "The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost
always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imagina-

tive life there is purpose...to give...form--to make it true and

real to the theme, not to life."50

As Anderson points out in the talk, his own work has
been based on his own life, but the material used is trans-
formed by his imagination and the theme that he is working
with so that the material is no longer realistic in the sense

that it is true to life but only in the sense that, given the

48Sherwood Anderson, A Writer's Concept g; Realism:
Ag Address (Olivet, Michigan? 19395-

491bid.

396

particular circumstances, it could be real. Thus, as in
"A Note on Realism," published in the Notebook,Anderson
denies that his work is an attempt to reproduce life in

a small town or anywhere else. It has been, he says, an
attempt to understand and interpret it wherever it may be
found.

Anderson's career as college lecturer and professional
man of letters was short although since he had been invited
to return to Colorado, it could not have been unsuccessful.
He did not like the lecture platform but preferred writing.
His letters during these years are full of advice to young
and aspiring writers. Above all, he told them to be honest,
both to themselves and to their work, and the rest would
take care of itself. During these last years, too, demands
were made on him constantly by the myriad committees of which
the 1930's were so fond. "I seem to have become a kind of
stuffed shirt for all sorts of things," he wrote. "People
keep coming to me, wanting me to sign this or that manifesto,
for Cultural Freedom, for Peace and Democracy, for this and
that. I do it and find myself involved."51 The truth was
that Anderson had at last entered on almost a full time basis
into the role that he had long sought and now fully enjoyed.
Secure in place and in his own emotions he found less and

less inclination to explain and to interpret and more and

 

51Letters, 441.

397

more to advise; he had at last become the small-town phi-
losopher-sage who had fought his battles and was now able

to retire to the fireside and attempt to help his successors
in theirs.

 

CHAPTER X
FINAL STATEMENT

During,the last two years of his life Anderson reached
a state of personal satisfaction.and equilibrium that would
have seemed impossible to him ten years before, but his liter-
ary reputation had largely evaporated. Nevertheless, in 1937
he was elected to the Department of Literature of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters. At first he was indignant; he
felt that it was one of the phony honors that distracted men
from their work. Then, however, the irony of the situation
began to amuse him, and he wrote that he couldn't attend the
official dinner because he had the diarrhea. There is no
record of the committee's response.

At the same time the rise of Hitler Germany depressed
him, not only because he as a pacifist was being forced to
accept the idea of a necessary war, but because he saw that
the increased attention given international affairs by the
Roosevelt Administration meant that the revolution in human
values engendered by the New Deal would have to be delayed
until Hitler and fascism were eliminated.

Nevertheless during these years he worked on his

last two long works, Home Town and the Memoirs, which was

398

 

399

unfinished at his death. Most of this writing was done in
his "Rogue's Gallery," a room lined with photographs of old
and new friends ranging from Waldo Frank to Henry Wallace.
In this atmosphere, evocative of a past that was sweeping
into history and being forgotten as Hitler moved into Aust-
ria, Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, Anderson wrote the
works that comprise the final statement of what he saw to
be the meaning of the American experience. These two, to-
gether with Puzzled America and Kit Brandon, make up Ander-
son's definitive commentary on the permanent values he had
found in his life, his relationships with others, and his
country.

Hgmg‘ggyg, the last full work Anderson saw completed
and published, appeared in 1940 in a shorter version as one
of ”The Face of America" series.1 Actually a long essay,
illustrated by superb Farm Security Administration photo-
graphs, the book as published shows Anderson's work come
full circle as he returns to the literary point of depar-
ture that he had left behind when he saw Bidwell grow into
an industrial city. In effect it is his final tribute to
the town as the solid foundation of values upon which Amer-
ica can build a new and human rather than material civiliza-
tion. It is Anderson's last tribute to the American past
and at the same time it indicates his hopes for the future.

1Sherwood Anderson, Home Town (New York, 1940).

 

400

In this version Home Town was cut to fit the needs
of a text and photograph combination. However, the full
essay, which was published as ”The American Small Town”
in The Sherwood Anderson Reader is more effective than
the book version in deve10ping and making clear Anderson’s
final statement of belief in the intrinsic value of rural
small town America and its meaning to him. Thus it is more
satisfactory for the purpose of this study.

In.his preface Anderson describes the intimacy of
his own feeling for the small town that had become his home:
"Perhaps I am in love with my own town of Marion and my
Virginia countryside;”2 but it is a love rooted in the human
relations for which he had been seeking:

My work is constantly calling me away from

Marion, but I always hunger to get back. There

is in the life of the small town a possibility

of intimacy, a chance to know others--an inti-

macy oftentimes frightening, but which can be

healing. Day after day, under all sorts of

circumstances, in sickness and health, in good
fortune and bad, we small-towners are close to

one another and know each other in ways the

city man can never experience...In a way it is

too int ate. Life can never be intimate

enough.

The essay proper is both an evocation of understand-
ing on the part of his readers for a life that is close to

the springs of fertility in nature and at the same time a

 

2The Sherwood Anderson Reader, 740.

3Ihid., 740-741.

 

401

delhneation of the meaning of that life. The small town,

he says, is America in its most immediate form, lying as

it does ”...halfway between the cities whence we get the
ideas and the soil whence we get the strength."4 Hence, to
know it and to live in it is to keep in the main current of
American life. The changing seasons of nature are the main-
springs that actuate life in the small towns, sending their
impulses through them and into the most complex reaches of
American civilization, while at the same time the intellect-
ual impulses reach downward out of the complexities until
they are humanized and.made part of American life in the
towns. There at the crossroads is where Anderson feels he
is closest to the essence of human life, where ideas are
made fertile.

The essay uses as its framework the seasonal cycle
of a year, tracing through the seasons the human activity
that each engenders, not only in the general repetitious
chores that are part of human life, but most effectively in
the individual reactions that are known only to those who
are aware of the intimacies possible in the small town.
Spring is an awakening both for the land and for the people.
Trees bloom, grass grows green, and the peOple indulge in
the human activities that Anderson can and does sketch both
economically and vividly. The town ball team starts its

“maid. , 744.

402

annual drive for financial support, the kids start to
think about creeks and fields, and the town non-conformist
has his annual shave and bath. Spring is indeed a happy
time and a time of reawakening in the towns.

Summer is a time of growth and of restlessness, cul-
minating in the days of hard work, harvest, and fulfillment,
but there are days of enjoyment, recreation, and wandering
as well. During,the long summer days and evenings the kids
learn the things that the schoolbooks don't teach about life.
Anderson says, "Hot, dusty days, long days, summer rains--
the summer days are the best of all the year's days for the
American small-towner."5 As the days shorten and fall comes,
the small town eXperiences ”...the checking-up time, the
harvesting of the year's efforts of the American man to

"5 the time that

survive, getting a little forward in life,
generates gentle nostalgia as well as stark fear. For the
fortunate,regret is easy and kind, but for the poor it brings
the fears for survival through the winter, the waiting time
during which the fears are realized or forgotten. But over
all there is the anticipation of spring, the realization that
it always comes.

The essay goes far beyond the mere recounting of the

symbolic representation of the seasons, however, and upon

this framework Anderson erects an almost kaleidoscOpio array~

_—

51bid., 772. 51b1d.. 778.

403

of the intimate observations and knowledge possible only
in the small town. All the village characters are here:
the tough, the chicken thief, the gossip, the politician,
the boy who doesn't quite have nerve enough to go into the
small house on the back street, the moralist, the merchant;
the focal points of town life in the churches, the schools,
the main street, and the newspapers are shown in their
proper roles; and over all the influx of new ideas, human-
ized to fit the town situation, is shown. ‘In effect Ander-
son has made the town itself a symbolic hero of what has
actually become primarily an elegy for a time and place that
Anderson knows no longer exists and yet that he knows is
part of his life. Throughout the book the undertones of
”breakup” are heard; the upheaval that started in the cities
has found its way into the towns, marking an end to the era
not only of industrialism but of the American small town.
Yet throughout the book there is an undercurrent of
permanence and inevitability. Just as the seasons change
from hope to fulfillment to need and then through the cycle
again, Anderson points up the permanence of the worthwhile
values that he has found in small-town life, and he makes
clear his belief that no matter what the physical setting
may be, man will still search for and eventually find the
value that is at their core--an intimacy between men and
between man and nature that teaches that the meaning of

life is in the recognition of man as an individual among

404

individuals who must be aware of his responsibilities to
his fellow man. In the small towns Anderson finds that

one is his brother's keeper, and in this concept he sees
the ultimate salvation of man.

In.this essay Anderson returns to the Winesburg prose
style at its best. His writing is rythmic, it is smooth,
and in the interspersed portraits of small-town life it is
real in the sense that he used the word in his talk at
Olivet. Touchingly but not sentimentally he portrays the
America that he had been seeking since he first turned his
back on Clyde, Ohio. This is the America that he had redis-
covered in marion, Virginia, as one of the last refuges of
the old life and at the same time one of the preservers of
the ultimate American values that he hopes to see revived
after America has passed through its time of trial and puri-
fication.and has attained once again an age of belief. £222
[£913 is Anderson's-last work published during his lifetime;
1t symbolizes the spirit of what he had learned in absorbing
the material for the works from figllg Towns! to Puzzled America;
and it remains his testament to what he has rediscovered as
the essence of meaning not only in Midwestern America but in
all of America,

‘With the publication of figmgflzggg Anderson's active
literary life was at an end. WOrk on the Memoirs and on
several magazine pieces was sporadic, and he spent most of

time at the farm and in Marion, writing to friends and

."Q rf

 

405

visiting with them. For the first time he had no plans for
creative work but was content to take it easy, a happy man
and undoubtedly a tired one, both of which he had been dur-
ing most of the Virginia years. As Home Town shows, he had
found faith in the permanence of peculiarly American institu-
tions, a faith that is reiterated in one of the last letters
that he wrote:

I have lived long enough, traveled widely

enough, and have known the so-called common

people enough in the United States to believe

that there is, at bottom, a great store of

common sense and of belief in democracy in

our American people...As for our own democrary,

why I dare say it will always be a somewhat

blundering thing, but it can always cure it-

self.

During these last years and months it is easy to go
through the letters and diaries, picking out fragments that
indicate dissatisfaction, frustration, and growing fears on
Anderson's part, much of which stemmed from difficulties
with writing, and it is even easier to accept the most ob-
vious explanation of them, that Anderson had finally come to
realize that he could no longer write. However, such an
interpretation is not the truth, as Home Town shows. Ander-
son could still write; Home Town is a carefully written
imaginative work as well as a clear statement of the values

that he recognized; and it indicates that the periods of

crisis he underwent during the last years were no more

 

7Letters, 466.

406

significant than his earlier crises. Rather, at this time
Anderson had come to the end of his evaluation of the Ameri-
can scene, and at the beginning of 1941 he was casting about
for a new direction for his work. On February 28, 1941,
with a semi-official State Department commission and a
Readerflg Digest contract for articles, he turned toward
South America and the new experiences he was looking for.

On March 8, he was dead at Colon in the Panama Canal Zone,
ironically the victim of peritonitis from a pro-sailing cock-
tail party toothpick that he had swallowed. He had found the
ultimate meaning of his America, and he had no place to go
except back to the hillside overlooking Marion on which he

is buried.

The irony of the obituary that appeared in the Elyria
Chronicle-Telegram is made even more tragic by the combination
of circumstances that made the appearance of the Memoirs pass
almost unnoticed. In December, 1941, America went to war;
in March, 1942, the Memoirs appeared and in a nation listen-
ing to the reports of defeats in the Philippines it simply
was not important Just as Anderson, categorized as a has-been,
was no longer important. Critical attention was scant, re-
viewers commented superficially that it was the same old
material, providing further evidence that Anderson was through,
and then it was ignored. None of them thought to evaulate it
either as literature or as a definitive statement of the mean-

ing of the American experience as interpreted by one who had

 

 

 

 

 

407

devoted a major portion of his life to defining that experi-
ence in terms of what it meant to the people who lived it.

Like Anderson's earlier autobiographical works, the
Memoirs defy classification because, as Horace Gregory points
out, Anderson was primarily an interpreter rather than a dis-
'seminator of factual material.8 As numerous critics have
Justifiably commented, his autobiographical works are often
useless and certainly untrustworthy as factual sources with-
out corroboration, and this is certainly true of the Memoirs.
Not only are dates and places hazy or at times wrong, but
Anderson interprets situations to suit himself and he places
emphasis upon apparent trivialities while he ignores facts
that an objective biographer would consider important.

All this points out that in the Memoirs as in the other
autobiographical works Anderson had something else in mind. I
Here, as in the other similar works, Anderson was concerned
not with his own life, but with American life, although the
only source through which he could approach it intimately was
through his own experience. In the preface he made this clear:

Is there even such a thing as a life of one's

own? Is it not some illusion, some limitation in

ourselves that makes us feel there is? It seems

to me that all lives merge...I want to use my own

life as a kind of springboard...I want to make my

book, my rambling house of a book, a book of

people...There is still another desire. I would

like to write a book of the mind and of the
imagination. Facts elude me. I cannot remember

8Horace Gregory, Introduction to The Portable Sherwood
Anderson (New Yerk, 1955). ll.

408

dates. When I deal in facts, at once I begin

to lie. I can't help it. I am by nature a

story teller.9

With this warning from Anderson in mind it is not only
possible but necessary for one to approach the book as imagi-
native literature as it should be regarded rather than as
autobiography, the convenient but inaccurate pigeonhole of
card catalogues and critics. James Schevill compares Ander-
son's.approach and purpose with that of Henry Adams in writing
his Education, and the point is valid, although the works as
well as the authors are dissimilar. However, Anderson was not
merely recording the growth of his imagination, as Schevill

comments;lo

rather, he was using the record of that growth
as he used the facts of his own life, as a springboard from
which he could leap into the American experience as he had
known it, define it, and point out its meaning, its true values,
and its strengths at the same time that he pointed out its con-
fusions and its failures.

In carrying this purpose to its culmination Anderson
'has, of course, used much of the same old material, as
critics have duly noted, and his recounting of the early
years is closely related in spirit to the portrayal in.ggr.
Here, however, he is not attempting to show the events through

the eyes of a child; instead, he is a man aware that he is at

the end of life, looking back in the attempt to portray the

 

9Memoirs, 7. loSchevill, 342.

409

microcosm of American life. Looking back as an adult he
sees life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century

as characterized by the human intimacy that he had paid

his tribute to in.figmg'gggn. It was an age in which lives
merged so that individualism was subservient to sympathy,
kindness, and love. This was the America that he saw de-
stroyed by materialism as it at once isolated and cheapened
the individual by deluding him into accepting things rather
than relationships as valuable. In recounting his early
advertising and commercial experience he epitomizes this
substitution of values, not only as it had deluded him but
primarily as it had captured the mind of America.

The Elyria years become then the reawakening of his
realization that human rather than material values are mean-
-ingful, and the rest of the book is devoted primarily to de-
picting his efforts to identify and to understand those values
as well as to rediscover them in American life. Behind this
personal struggle Anderson sees an America going through the
same crisis, with a subconscious awareness of failure emerging
slowly into consciousness as the depression makes clear the
transcience of things and the endurance of the human spirit.
At the end he has returned to a life in which he can accept
and live by those permanent values, and he feels that America
will do the same.

Such is the sequence of the Memoirs, in essence a

history of the cycle of American life through the period that

410

saw it change from an agricultural to an industrial society.
But it is not a factual and documented history; instead it
is the record of the influence of factual happenings upon
human life, and the focus lies not upon the events but upon
the lives themselves, Anderson's own and those of the people
he had come to understand and love during those years. In
the final analysis, then, the Memoirs is a book about people
rather than things or events, and its subject is the nature
of life rather than its surface. Its theme is the understand-
ing of the American experience, the identification of what is
worthwhile in it, and the attempt to reconcile the two in life.
Out of this theme grows Anderson's final commentary on
American life, and it is stated in the curious blend of opti-
mism and despair that had characterized his work and his life
almost from the beginning. The nature of life, he points out,
is tragic; man is destined to live and die alone, isolated
from his fellows, unable to know or be known by them, and he
lives distorted and unfulfilled because of circumstances over
which he has no control. However, the tragedy of life is un-
important to him because in spite of it life has meaning that
lies in refusing to despair and in continually Opposing the
nature of life by trying to break down the barriers between
men, by refusing to accept the inevitable, and by slowly com-
ing.closer to the understanding and fulfillment that man needs.

Meaning is not in the end but in the means, he concludes, as

411

he sums up in one phase what he has learned: "Life, not
death, is the great adventure.”11

In concept as well as in execution the Memoirs is
closely related to Winesburg, th9. Like Winesburg, it is
essentially a story of people set in a particular period in
time and space and unified thematically as well as structur-
ally through the presence of a central character. Just as
George Willard was the catalyst that made life and experience
come clear in Winesburg, so does Anderson himself serve the
same purpose here. The grotesques who people the world be-
come human beings again just as had those of the village;
still isolated and alone because of the force of circumstance,
nevertheless they become knowable and lovable as they are re-
vealed. Winesburg is the story of the growth of awareness of
the intrinsic worth of human beings as a young man comes to
know them; the Memoirs is the story of that young man grown
old as he looks back over a life devoted to breaking down
barriers so that men may know each other.

The youthful confidence that sees the possibility of
removing barriers through love is gone, of course. As
George Willard went off into the world hesaw a long life
ahead in which full understanding would come. Here, however,
is the mature individual who knows now that that is impossible
and who has accepted that inherent tragedy of life. In spite

 

11Memoirs. 507.

412

of this realization, however, he has maintained his faith
in the intrinsic worth of the individual, and he still
accepts the validity of searching for understanding and
coming closer to it.

Like Winesburg, too, the Memoirs deals with the
distinction between appearance and reality. Just as in
Winesburg Anderson had shown the growth of realization that
the two are not synonymous, here, too, Anderson makes that
point clear, but again there is a difference. The earlier
book had dealt with gaining that knowledge. Here Anderson
describes the efforts needed to learn to distinguish between
the two and to find the reality that underlies appearance.

The difference between the two points of view is, of course,
the difference between youth and age. Not only is it neces-
sary to understand that a dichotomy between appearance and
reality does exist, Anderson points out, but once having
reached that understanding, it is necessary to learn to apply
the difference in life situations. This is the task of a
lifetime.

‘Not only is there a direct thematic relationship be-
tween Winesburg and the Memoirs, but structure and.style are
also closely related. Like Winesburg, the Memoirs is a uni-
fied collection of sketches that are amplifications of theme
rather than plotted and individualized stories or descriptive
narratives. Just as each story in.Uinesburg was an attempt

to remove the barrier of appearance and to make clear the

 

 

 

 

 

 

413

essence of a human spirit in a particular moment in time,

so too is the nature of each of the sketches in the Memoirs.
Anderson is trying to show the reality underlying appearance
as he has come to know it, and each sketch brings the reader
closer to understanding his view of the basic dichotomy. As
a result, the individual sketches become unified by approach
as well as by theme and the presence of a central figure.

In style Anderson has gone back to the natural Mid-
western rhythms of Winesburg, abandoning the jerky experi-
mental style that had marred so much of his work between 1925
and 1935. As Puzzled America, _I_{_i_t_ Brandon and £922 321:; show,
Anderson had come to recognize the ineffectiveness of much of
his experimentation and had moved away from it and back into
his most effective and most individualized style. Here he
shows complete rejection of innovation, and the style is that.
of the American townsman who looks at his life and world and
describes clearly and easily what he sees.

The Memoirs might have been Anderson’s best book, and
as published it indicates that stylistically, structurally,
and thematically it was to be his most carefully controlled
and planned work. Unfortunately at his death it was in-
complete, existing only in a mass of unrelated manuscript
pages, and the published version is the result of editing by
a group of friends headed by Paul Rosenfeld. Making a book
out of another man's manuscript is difficult at best, and

the incomplete state of this one made the job even.more

414

difficult. Although Anderson had left an outline of the book,
some of the material was unwritten, and in the effort to fill
out the framework the editors ressurrected material that Ander-
son had written and cast aside as early as 1920. The result
mars the finished work,sdetracting from its unity and effec-
tiveness in spite of the fact that the skeleton of some sec-
tions has been fleshed. The book would have been more satis-
factory had the editors recognized that Anderson was not writ-
ing a factual autobiography and had merely noted that portions
were incomplete instead of trying to make an autobiography out
of it. The book as a whole is less satisfactory than it might
have been because of faulty editing rather than shortcomings
in Anderson's conception of it. It is unfortunate that Ander-
son did not live to complete it.

In addition to the failure of the editors to recognize
the approach that Anderson was using and to maintain it, an-
other serious editorial shortcoming detracts from the effec-
tiveness of the book. This is the fact that they did not see
the changing styles of Anderson's work during the twenties
and thirties. In the middle thirties he had returned to the
Winesburg style, and the Memoirs was for the most part written
in that style. However, in introducing material written dur-
ing the late twenties and early thirties the editors used
sections that were written in the jerky experimental rhythms
of that period, and stylistic unity suffers as a result.

 

-iIIIIIJ

 

 

 

 

415

On the whole, however, the Memoirs is a book that is
both important and good. It is important because it pro-
vides tangible evidence that Anderson had finally reconciled
experience and ideal and had come to the conclusion that
although the evidence of experience indicated that man's
life was essentially tragic because of forces that he could
not control, nevertheless there was meaning in life if one
sought it: the values inherent in a job well done, in an
appreciative and understanding relationship with others, and
in the realization that life itself was "the great adventure."12
It is a good book in Spite of the shortcomings of the editorial
work because as conceived and partially executed it has some-
thing to say about the American experience that is worth say-
ing, and it says it well.

During the last few years of his life Anderson had
come a long way, and he had incorporated into his life the
ideal meaning that he had been looking for. After his dis-
coveries of his own identity and of a permanent place in a
changing society he was capable of identifying and pointing
out the permanent values that continued to exist in America
in spite of the powerful but misleading veneer of material-
ism that had disguised the real America for so long.

This last period of his life saw, as a result of his

reaffirmation of human values, another rediscovery as

 

121pm.

416

important to Anderson as the earlier two. This was the
rediscovery of faith in the democratic process. After
examining the glib, easy solution to the problems of in-
dustrialization, materialism, and dehumanization that was
offered by Communism, he recognized that the cure was as
dangerous as the malady, and as a result he renewed his be-
lief in the admittedly imperfect, often blundering, but
nevertheless inevitable reflection of the peopleS' hopes
and desires through American democratic procedures. That
this was not an idle dream or irrational hepe he saw demon-
strated as the New Deal effected the revolution in the rela-
tionship between government and individual that he had sought
and that Communism had seemed to promise. In response to the
democratic will the focus of government had shifted from its
concept of its preper role as an extension of materialism
to its new role as an extension of the individual, helping
him to do what he could not accomplish alone.

Anderson had not formulated specific answers to
specific aspects of these problems that had occupied him
for almost all of his adult life, nor did he really expect
to. Rather what he sought and eventually found was a code
of values embracing his faith in intrinsic human worth that,
when adopted by government as well as individuals, would
bring about specific solutions by action controlled by com-
passion for the individual, and he lived long enough to
insure himself that the ultimate solution to all the speci-
fic problems was within reach as the New Deal extended its

influence.

 

417

This last period was not a time of frustration, of
despair, and of degeneration of creative powers, as some
critics maintain. Rather it was a productive time, a time
of fulfillment, and a time of optimism. His critical reputa-
tion had remained in the low state that it had been in for
more then ten years, but he realized that that was mere
appearance and, as such, unimportant. Understanding of others
was the important thing, and he had devoted his life to it.
Shortly before his death he wrote "If real understanding is
to grow, it cannot be done by politicians and businessmen.
There must be, instead, a flow of ideas back and forth, a
flow of feeling."13 This was what he had been striving for
both in his writing and in his life.

Not only is the work of these last few years sufficient
to refute the accusation that Anderson could no longer write,
but Anderson attained intellectual maturity in his rejection
of rebellion as a satisfactory solution to social and economic
evil; he attained emotional maturity in his successful marri-
age relationship; and, most importantly, he indicated in his
handling of complex thematic material in.§;t Brandon and
"Brother Death" that he had maintained his hold on artistic
craftsmanship. The final works, EQEEHEQEE and the incomplete
Memoirs, remain as good craftsmanship as well as final affirma-
tion of the human values that he had sought and effective re-

creations of a vanished society.

 

13Letters, 426.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION

After an active literary career of nearly thirty years,
Anderson was in critical disfavor when he died, a disfavor
that has persisted in spite of its paradoxical nature. Criti-
cal opinion generally has relegated Anderson to a minor posi-
tion in American literary history, and yet it has not only
been unable to ignore him but has continued to give him more
attention than many figures considered to be major. The rea-
son for this is obvious: when he was at his best, he was
very good, so good, in fact, that Winesburg, thg and some
of the shorter works have become modern classics, while on
the other hand, when he was being most determinedly modern
and artistic as in Many Marriages and most of the later novels
he imposed a kind of dating on his work that made it as old
fashioned as any other passing fad almost as soon as it was
written.

Behind this dichotomy in his work lies another reason
for the continuation of critical examination in spite of the
absolute pronouncements critics have made. Even while he
was still alive Anderson had taken on the preportions of a

mythical figure, one who perhaps more than any other American

embodied the dream of almost every critic, academic or

418

419

commercial, who has ever approached him. The myth has main-
tained that almost alone among people prominent in the his-
tory of twentieth century American literature, Anderson had
the courage to reject commercial success and to devote him-
self to his art. That this does not correspond closely to
the facts of his life has been pointed out by numerous aca-
demic critics, but such disagreement is unimportant because
it is apparently embedded as firmly as the George Washington-
cherry tree story in American folklore. Incorporating an
ideal almost as difficult to realize as absolute truth, the
myth seems likely to endure.

The dichotomy in Anderson's work and the myth that
has grown up around his life have tended to engender two
emotions that dominate Anderson criticism: harshness, stem-
ming from the inability to reconcile the two extremes of his
work, and sentimentality that results from personal identifi-
cation with the problem behind the myth of his life. These
two emotional approaches have become so commonplace that
they sometimes exist side by side in the same critical study,
resulting in a stereotyped approach that hinders evaluation
of Anderson's work, understanding of what he was attempting
to do, and recognizing the importance of the close relation-
ship between his work and the unique American experience
through which he lived.

Winesburg,lghig and a number of individual short
stories, notably ”I want to know Why," "I'm a Fool," "The

420

Egg,” and "The Man Who Became a Woman," have been frequently
and justifiably pointed out as Anderson's permanent contribu-
tions to American.literature, and Pg 3 flhitg has often been
added to the list. However, these works are the products of
Anderson's earlier active career, when he still received wide
critical acceptance, and their worth has never been seriously
questioned. At the same time the list ignores the fact that
the short stories have been lifted out of the context of the
volumes in which they appeared and have lost much of their
meaning and effectiveness in the process. This generally
acknowledged list is accurate as far as it goes, but it is
incomplete. To these products of his early period must be
added the entire volumes 2.1.1.2 Triumph _o_f_' the Egg and Horses E251
Egg, not only because they include such other excellent stories
as "Seeds," ”Unlighted Lamps,” "The Sad Horn Blowers,” and "An
Ohio Pagan," but because they are collections that are of com-
paratively even quality. Much of the time they rise to the
levels of the usually cited stories, and, most importantly,
they are unified collections both structurally and thematically
that comment on the nature of men's lives as effectively and
as perceptively as does Winesburg, th2. Stories and sketches
are included that are less satisfactory than the best, just as
there are in Winesburg, but to ignore the subtlety with which
Anderson brought unity out of apparent diversity is to ignore
one of his most skillful capabilities.

Because the stereotyped approach to Anderson's work

 

 

 

 

421

states that he had lost his effectiveness at this point,
worthwhile contributions of the later periods are un-
fortunately ignored. To the list must be added parts of
A Stggy Teller'g Story from the following period, especially
Book One and a number of other sections. This volume does
contain the same old stuff, as many critics are quick to
point out, and the book as a whole is uneven~in execution,
but both structurally and stylistically here Anderson is
often at his best, reproducing both the Midwestern rhythms
and idioms almost flawlessly and incorporating them in the
old oral story-telling tradition so that the result elevates
that same old subject matter to the realm of American mythology.

From the last years of Anderson's career it is necessary
to add the complete volumes M _I_13 the m and .I_{_i_t Brandon,
the incomplete Memoirs, and numerous essays fromIHEIIQ Townsl,
Puzzled America, and other sources. The first is not only his
most consistently high-level collection of stories, but it also
contains two of his best, WDeath In the weeds” and "Brother
Death." Most importantly it is an integrated and mature
examination of Anderson's belief that reality must be separ-
ated from appearance if it is to be recognized and understood.
The collection as a whole is as good as anything he had done
in the earlier years.

git Brandon is his most objective and most fully re-
alized novel, suffering only from carelessness and inattention,

neither of which is sufficient to condemn it. In this novel

 

a
.
g
.
Q ' w
.
7
4
I
O
. l
‘

 

 

422

Anderson comes close to understanding the nature of the
American experience as a product of the peculiar circum-
stances inherent in the growth of the country, an achieve-
ment that is matched in his own work only by the incomplete
Memoirs that was to be his definitive interpretation of the
American experience as he had known it.

The best of the essays are parts of this whole, each
of them an attempt to come closer to an understanding of an
individual moment in Space and time, whether it concerned
an individual, a group, or a set of circumstances. Each of
the better essays is dominated by careful attention to crafts-
manship as well as by penetrating intuitive understanding of
the essence of the material, and in them Anderson focuses
attention on the significance of the small, the seemingly
unimportant, and the easily ignored in human life.

These are the works that must be included in a con-
venient list of Anderson's permanent contributions to Ameri-
can literature, a list that, while it is not imposing, is
nevertheless not as insignificant as it may seem. But in
order to understand Anderson and what he was trying to do,
it is not enough to limit attention to any list of most
successful works. Rather, as this study has attempted to
show, Anderson's work can only be regarded as a whole, cem-
posed of many parts, because the major theme to which he
devoted his attention was the meaning of the American

experience as he had known and lived it.

423

Anderson's work in its entirety is an attempt to
penetrate appearance and to determine the nature of the
reality beneath it. To Anderson, material manifestations
were unimportant. He did not deny their existance; on the
contrary, as in the case of the twisted apples left to rot
in the orchards near Clyde, he knew that often appearance
was in some odd way related to essential nature, but that
the relationship was often ignored or misunderstood. This
realization came to him early, certainly by the time he had
established himself in business in Elyria, and the literary
career that followed resulted from the impact of that dis-
covery upon his mind, a mind that was essentially untrained
and uneducated and that found its way to a satisfactory
resolution of the dilemma only through a long process of
trial and error, acceptance and rejection.

The most obvious discrepancy between appearance and
reality was for Anderson the difference between the American
ideal as he had learned it and as he had seen it put into
practice during the years that America became increasingly
a country dominated by the production and consumption of
things at the cost of the values inherent in the ideal. The
attempt to separate traditional values from a materialistic
ethic that had subverted them led him into literature by
way of a back door because the words that he had learned to
use effectively as a means of promoting consumption marge

the only means he had by which to attack this distortion

o
. o
I
A o
a
n
V
a
e
7 A r
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1
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. y ,

 

 

424

and confusion of values. In actuality Anderson began his
literary career as a propagandist fighting against the cor-
ruption of the American ideal by materialism.

However, Anderson learned by the time he finished
Marching Meg that there was no easy answer to the problem,
and the discovery made him a writer instead of a prOpagand-
ist. His goal had not changed, but the means he had brought
to bear on it were insufficient. Between 1915 and 1918 he
began a tentative analysis that would lead him deeply into
his subject matter at the same time that he realized the
necessity of evolving a stylistic technique that would make
his writing effective rather than merely functional.

With the writing of Winesbur , thg he had not for-
saken his purpose to determine the relationship between nature
and eXperience and appearance and reality; he had merely in-
tensified it by closely examining individuals who had been
crippled spiritually by the confusion of values inherent in
a confused society. Encouraged by the success of his approach
he broadened it in following works, attempting to incorporate
more of his experience into his works, only to find that there
still were no answers to his problem, a problem that became
increasingly personal as he realized that he, too, had been
confusing many things for a long time. Once more he shifted
his direction and narrowed his scope in order to examine his
experience more closely. The introspection that followed

enabled him to accept his inability to reconcile the apparent

 

ill! 14

 

 

425

dichotomies in life at the same time that penetration of the
surface of his own life gave him a sense of identity and a
sense of role, both of which pointed out the values that he
had thus far been unable to define in his works.

Out of this crucial period Anderson formulated the
concepts that dominated his later work and that remain as
his final comments on the meaning of the American experience
as it had been reflected in his own life. They were simple
enough, so simple that they seem naive at the same time that
their simplicity emphasizes the depth that often lies behind
the apparently simple. The identity and the place that he
determined to be his were those that he had misunderstood
and rejected when he had accepted the appearance upon which
a material society is constructed, and after re—establishing
himself as an artist-craftsman who belonged in a town rather
than a center of materialism he could go on to formulate
his concepts of the nature of the reality behind experience.
Actually they were concepts that he had intuitively recog-
nized from the time that he first realized the existence of
the discrepancy between appearance and reality, and they had
been reflected in his work from the beginning: man could
break down the barriers that separated him.from his fellows
through compassion and through empathetic understanding.

In the process he would recognize the true values in human
life, the understanding and love that, mutually achieved,
would make human life worth living.

426

This is the essence of Anderson's philosophy, a solu-
tion to the problems inherent in human experience that is
both simple and complex. It was easy to say, as he had
long known, but at the same time it was, he finally concluded,
impossible to realize. Close as he was to naturalism and
despair at this point, he finally acknowledged that the end
itself was an ideal, and like all ideals, beyond the cap-
abilities of human nature. Resulting from this was his ulti-
mate conclusion that the means rather than the end, life it-
self rather than an impossible perfection, was the only mean-
ing man could know, but it was far from a petty or ignoble
meaning.

This is the concept that dominates both his life and
works from 1929 to his death: man is his brother's keeper,
he declared, whether he would acknowledge the fact or not.
It was the realization of this truth that made human life
meaningful, and its rejection, brought about by a preoccupa-
tion with things, that led to the inevitable dehumanization
of American society. The American experience was therefore
one that demanded a careful and continuous examination if
one would find meaning inherent in it. Its nature, as he
pointed out, had been such that from the beginning it de-
manded that man concern himself with the material appearance
of life in spite of its great potential of achieving human
fulfillment, and only the individual himself could prevent
the material from completely nullifying his potential in his

own life.

427

Anderson's works as a whole record his discovery of
this truth, one that a more sophisticated man possessed or
more education would have accepted as obvious and then
promptly forgotten. However, Anderson, like his nineteenth
century predecessors Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, was not
interested in discovering the physical laws that govern the
universe; instead, he restricted his attention to the obvious
problems of human life and tried to find a way to live with
them. The entire range of his works from E1221 McPherson'g
§gg to the Memoirs is the record of his attempt to make that
possible by finding the meaning inherent in human experience
as he had known it. A

Anderson belongs properly in the main stream of
American idealism that had its inception in the self-evident
truths of natural rights, was nurtured in the Trancendental-
ist realization that somewhere beyond physical appearance lay
the ultimate truth of man's fate, and then fell into confused
disorder before the combined onslaught of Darwinism and eco-
nomic determinism. The confusion endured in a world suddenly
grown complex, but by the beginning of the twentieth century
the disorder had been replaced by a counter-offensive deter-
mined to show the evils inherent in a world dominated by
materialism. Anderson was temperamentally‘suited to become
a member of this counter-offensive, and he was a member in

spirit long before he became one in fact.

 

 

428

The literary movement and atmosphere with which he
associated himself as he found himself as a writer is clear
indication of his membership in the idealistic counter-
offensive. The keynote of the Chicago Renaissance was
Liberation, and it was devoted to freeing the writer from
confusion and from the concessions that idealism had made
to genteelness. Liberation meant honestn and honesty meant
that the major issues in American life could no longer be
ignored. The movement had its superficial aspects, as Ander-
son learned; at times it seemed to be dominated by superficial-
ity, but its core was a determination to right old wrongs at
the same time that it established a new and honest American
literary tradition.

Before Anderson joined the Chicago group, he had
been primarily a propagandist, focusing on issues rather
than people. His reaction to materialism was instinctive
and direct, so that the early novels, HindprcPherson'gwggn
and Marching M32, are based in protest and rejection while
they are expressed in the formidable diction and style of
late nineteenth century popular literature. But the literary
movement of which the Chicago group was a part taught him that
what he was doing was not literature, and it pointed out his
new direction.

In the context of the new literary tradition of pro-
test and rejection Anderson's relationship to his major liter-

ary contemporaries is evident in bothlds attitudes and his

429

techniques. Although he often gave credit to Gertrude Stein
for having made him aware of the potential inherent in words
and style, nevertheless his affinity to others is much closer.
He moved out of Miss Stein's orbit of experimentation after
the initial impetus and into a circle that was largely Mid-
western, so much so that in its view of its birthplace it has
been called a Russianldew by D. H. Lawrence.

The two major Midwestern novelists with whOm Anderson
can be compared are Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, while
among the poets his closest relationship is with Vachel Lindsay
and Edgar Lee Masters. Anderson has much in common with all
of them although at the same time there are major differences.
Like Dreiser and Lewis Anderson protested against an environ-
ment that made people less than human, and he was aware of
this kinship, especially with Dreiser, to the end. But the
protests of the three took different directions; for Dreiser
there was no way out of the deterministic environment that
his people were caught in, while for Lewis there was no need
to wrestle with the imponderables as long as one could expose
and at the same time secretly understand and sympathize with
a society devoted to externals. Anderson could not accept
the naturalistic helplessness of Dreiser's people and his
own, even while the evidence overwhelmingly indicated that
Dreiser was right. Nor could he be satisfied with the in-
dictment of a system as was Lewis. Instead he sought in his

own way to find permanent answers, even after he accepted the

430

impossibility of finding those answers and had to settle
for the meaning inherent in the search and in love and com-
passion for his people.

In.spirit Anderson is closer to the poets Masters
and Lindsay. Not only is the basic structural pattern of
Master's S2193 5.1.3.93 Anthology close to Winesburg, thg,
but both works penetrate below surface appearance to reveal
the essence of repressed humanity, an approach that became
Anderson's most effective technique. Masters, however, is
protesting against the system in the Anthology; in Winesburg
and the other sub-surface examinations Anderson regrets the
shortcomings inherent in human nature that prevent deep
understanding.

The relationship between Lindsay and Anderson is
closest of all because these two, more than any of the
others, sought to go beyond pretest and condemnation and to
find new and enduring values upon which to build a humanized
society. Both of them sought a faith that was essentially
spiritual and idealistic, although Lindsay was primarily con-
cerned with a faith firmly rooted in conventional Christian-
ity, especially in his early years, while Anderson rejected
such values in favor of a secular although no less mystic
faith. Both of them moved beyond rejection and rebellion
and into a final and positive affirmation.

In moving beyond rebellion Anderson became most clearly

an idealist and a romantic. He believed firmly that somewhere

 

 

431

a life based upon compassion, love, and understanding could
be found, and he sought it in the past and in the towns,
where man could live communally and close to nature at the
same time, finding strength and mutual fulfillment in the
process of living.

This is the Sherwood Anderson who is little known
and usually misunderstood, and this is the Anderson who did
much misunderstanding himself. He was a seeker once he re-
alized that there were no easy answers and put propaganda
behind him. In his search for the almost perfect world (he
rejected perfection because it is no longer human) he fused
his work and his life, and in so doing moved across both
literary and ideological lines so freely that he confused
both his contemporaries and himself. Althoughle considered
himself a "modern", he looked back in spirit to a romanticism
that freed the individual from his environmental confines.
As an artist he attempted to be advanced and eXperimental,
but his most effective style grew out of an old oral tradi-
tion. .

The confusion and misunderstanding inherent in these
contradictions affected both Anderson and his contemporaries
to the extent that the idealistic and romantic nature of his
work passed almost unnoticed during his lifetime. Instead
he was called a realist, a naturalist, a modern, a Freudian,
and a Marxist, all of which he was not, and to a great extent

he must have accepted the titles because he did little or

 

 

432

nothing to deny them, and the title of realist that he often
applied to himself implies a close adherence to surface
phenomena that is merely the point of departure for most of
his work.

This misunderstanding has continued to the present.
Generally Anderson is still grouped loosely to naturalism
and occasionally to the post-World War I decadents, eSpec-
ially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. However, Anderson's links
to these groups are tenuous at best. Not only did he go well
beyond naturalism in his search for answers to problems that
he saw as essentianw Spiritual rather than deterministic,
but from the beginning of his literary career he rejected
the decadence that eventually drove Eliot into the dogmatism
of the past in religion and politics as well as literature
and Pound into incomprehensibility and authoritarianism.

The answers that Anderson sought were no less individual than
mystic, and they resolved themselves into a compassion for
people rather than theories or systems of any kind.

On the other hand Anderson's affinities to D. H.
Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway are quite close. Like Law-
rence, with whom Anderson identified himself in the twenties,
Anderson was concerned with breaking down the artificial
barriers isolating men so that mature and lasting love might
become possible, and again like Lawrence Anderson did not
hesitate to use physical love as the outward manifestation

of a deeper spiritual love. However, in spite of Anderson's

433

reputation as a daring and shocking writer, he could never
bring himself to treat the physical aspects of love with
Lawrence's frankness.

The relationship between Anderson and Hemingway is
even closer. Not only did Anderson's literary style in-
spire Hemingway's and through Hemingway an entire genera-
tion of American writers, but also the thematic ties be-
tween them are quite close. Essentially both of them are
idealistic romantics whose people, hurt spiritually by a
hostile world, have embarked on a search for meaning in
spite of the fact that apparently there is none. Eventually
both of them point out in their works that the end of the
search is not important; that what matters is the way in
which the search is carried out. This is the position that
Anderson approaches as early as in Horses §_n_d_ Egg, while
Hemingway arrives there much later in Egg‘flhgg Ehgyggllyigllg.
For each it comes after a period of flirtation with despair.

After Anderson's idealism had rid itself of anger
and indignation when he began his search for permanent
values through his association with the Chicago Renaissance,
his search for the values that he could adopt and affirm led
him to focus on people, on the individual human lives that
make up the generality "America” that had been celebrated by
others such as Carl Sandburg. In so doing Anderson found
himself in the difficult position of trying to find abstract
principles through examinations of individual human lives.

434

That he was never able to find those principles not only
emphasizes the difficulty of the task, but more importantly,
it provides the most enduring of his works--those in which
he penetrates for a brief but revealing moment into the
heart of another human being.

The durable qualities of Anderson's work lie in the
closeness and persistence with which he came to grips with
his purpose, and they lie in the subject matter, the techni-
ques, and the spirit that he combined to give form to his
theme. The experience that he chose for treatment in his
work is the record of Americaas it moved from idealistic
youth into cynical and selfish maturity. The loss of inno-
cence concurrent with the rise of industrialism has had no
more effective and conscientious chronicler. Furthermore,
the people with whom he is always concerned are people still
possessed of that innocence who find themselves lost in a
society that no longer values either it or them, and again
Anderson's portrayal is honest, compassionate, and effective
as he brings them alive.

The durability of the style that Anderson made his

own in Winesburg, Ohio and gave freely to the mainstream of‘

 

American literature is unquestioned. As long as the Ameri-
can idioms are spaken in the easy rhythms radiating out from
the Midwestern heartland, Anderson's style will be recognized,
understood, and appreciated by the people who gave rise to

it, no matter what the current critical preference may be.

435

In style more than anywhere else Anderson has come closer
to reproducing and interpreting a vital part of the American
experience.

The spirit of Anderson's work is the spirit of life,
and this, too, will endure. The wonder of human life, a
compassionate regard for it, and a-compelling sense of dis-
covering significance in the commonplace permeate his works,
giving rise to a lyric beauty even in despair. Love, com-
passion, sympathy, and understanding are the human virtues
that raise man above his animal origins and prevent him from
being a machine, as Anderson points out at the same time that
he shows his acceptance of the concept in his work. Life is
not only the great adventure for Anderson; in the final analy-
sis it is the universal value.

In an age that denies the values Anderson believed
in even more emphatically than did his own, Anderson's place
among the Journalists and the sensationalists is small, and
his shortcomings as a literary artist will undoubtedly pre-
vent much enlargement of that place in the overall range of
literary history. However, as a man who approached life with
reverence, who spoke of it with love, and who provided some
of the most eloquent expressions of both in his time, his

place is secure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sherwood Anderson's Works
My McPherson'g _S__g_n (New York: John Lane 00., 1916).
Marching Men.(New York: John Lane 00., 1917).
Egg-American Chants (New York: John Lane 00., 1918).
Winesbur , 9h 2 (New York: B. W. Heubach, Inc., 1919).
Eggg‘flhgtg_(New York: B. W. Huebach, Inc., 1921).

The Trium h‘gf the Egg (New York: B. W. Huebach, Inc.,
1921).

Wind McPhersonflg Son (Revised, New York: B. W. Huebach,
nc., 1921).

M Marriages (New York: B. w. Huebach, 1923).

Horses _a._g_c_1_ 313 (New York: B. w. Huebach, 1923).
_A_t_<_>__1 _T_'_______eller'_s_ §___1 (New York: B. N. Huebach, 1924).

.Qggk Lagghter (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925).

The Modern Writer (San Francisco: Gelber, Lilienthal,
Inc., 1925).

Taré)_ A Midwest Childhood (New York: Boni and Liveright,
192

Sherwood Anderson'g Notebook (New York, Boni and Liveright,
92

'A New Testament (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927).
Hello Towns! (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929).

Nearer the Grass Roots (San Francisco: The Westgate
Press, 1929).

Alice and The Lost N__o_____ve1 (London: Elkin Mathews and
Marrot, 1929).“

436

437

.222 American County'zgig (New Ybrk: Random House, 1930).
Perhaps 19.92.92 (New York: Horace Liveright, 1931).
Beyond Desire (New York: Horace Liveright, 1932).
Qggthigg'thg‘flgggg (New York: Horace Liveright, 1933).
Ng,§gggk (Philadelphia: The Centaur Press, 1934).

Puzzled America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1935).

Kit Brandon (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936).

Pla s: Winesburg and Others (New York: Charles
Scribner 3 Sons, 19 7).

A writer's Conceptig; Realism (Olivet, Michigan: Olivet
OiIege, I9 9 0

Home Town (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1940).

Sherwood Anderson'g Memoirs (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and 00., 1932).

The Sherwood Anderson Reader, edited with an introduction
by Paul Rosenfeld (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1947).

The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited with.an introduction
by Horace Gregory (New York: The Viking Press, 1949).

Letters 2; Sherwood Anderson, selected and edited.with
an introduction and noted by Howard Mumford Jones in
association with.Wa1ter P. Rideout (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co., 1953)

Uncollected magazine publications

"The Rabbit-pen,” Harpers’ Egggggggg GXXIX (JU1Ya 1914):
207-210.

"Sister," The Little Review, 11 (Dec., 1915). 3-4.

"Vibrant Life," The Little Review, III (March, 1916),
10-11.

"When I Left Business for Literature,” Cantu my, CXIII
(Aug-9 1924), 489-96.

438

Bibliggraphies

No full bibliography of works by and about Anderson has yet
appeared. The most valuable at present are the following:

Mary E. Jessup. ”A Checklist of the Writings of Sherwood
Anderson,” American Collector, V(l928), 157-158. This
gives useful data for identification purposes.

Raymond D. Gozzi. ”A Bibliography of Sherwood Anderson's
Contributions to Periodicals, 1914-1946,” Newberr
Librar Bulletin, Second Series, No. 2 (Dec., 193%).
This provides a very nearly complete listing of
Anderson's essays and short stories, especially
valuable for a guide to uncollected works.

William L. Phillips. "The First Printing of Sherwood
Anderson's Winesbur , Ohio," Studies ;g_Bibliography,
IV(1951), elf-"2'13. firms is an interesting and in-
formative bibliographical study.

John W. Aldridge, editor. Critigues and Essays 93 Modern
Fiction 1220-1251 (New York: Ronald Press, 1952).
This has a useful but far from complete critical
bibliography on pp. 572-57#.

Critical Books

Bryllion N. Fagin. Egg Phenomenon 9;_Sherwood Anderson
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1927)
is an early extremely favorable work that gives in-
sight into the early favorable view.

Cleveland B. Chase. Sherwood Anderson.(New York: Robert
M. McBride and Co., 1927) is an early unfavorable
study that has set the tone for much later criticism.

Irving Howe. Sherwood Anderson (New York: Sloane, 1951)
is a generally unfavorable and at times oversimplified
and sketchy study of both life and works.

James Schevill. Sherwood Anderson, His Life and.Works
(Denver: UniVersity of Denver Press, 1951), is a
painstaking and reliable study of both.

Critical Articles.§g Periodicals and Sections ;§;Books
Paul Rosenfeld. Port of New York (New York: Harcourt,

Brace and Co., 1923) is a limited and favorable early
appreciation.

439

Clifton Fadiman. ”Sherwood Anderson: The Search for
Salvation," Nation, CXXXV(Nov. 9, 1932), 454-456,
anticipates the recognition of a basic unity in
Anderson's work.

Granville Hicks. The Great Tradition (New York: Macmillan,
1933) is limited, but it notes the reflection of the
American experience in Anderson's work.

Russell Blankenship. American Literature (New York: Henry
Holt and Co., 1939) is much too dependent on the early
stereotyped view of Anderson.

Waldo Frank. "Winesbur Ohio After Twenty Years,” Stor ,
XIX(Sept.-Oct., 1941), 29-33, is the most accura e and
revealing study of Winesburg to appear thus far.

Oscar Cargill. Intellectual America.(New York: Macmillan,
1941) interprets Anderson primarily in terms of a pre-
conception.

Alfred Kazin. Qg,Native Grounds (New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, 1942) accepts Anderson as a realist.

Lionel Trilling. ”Sherwood Anderson,” Kenyon.Review, III
(Summer, 1942), 293-302, is the basis of his later
essa inlghg Liberal Imagination (New York: Macmillan,
1948 . Limited in scope, it is quite over-generalized.

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. finderstanding
Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crof s, 19 3)
sees "I Want to Know Why" as merely adolescent
initiation.

Paul Rosenfeld. Introduction to The Sherwood Anderson
Reader (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1947) sees Anderson
as a naturalist.

Maxwell Geismar. Th2 Last 2; Egg Provincials (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1959). The chapter "Sherwood
Anderson: The Last of the Townsman" is both per-
ceptive and appreciative although limited in scope.

Horace Gregory. Introduction to The Portable Sherwood
Anderson (New York: The Viking Press, 1949) is a
valuable brief survey.

Arthur Sherbo. T; Want tgyKnow‘Wh and Brooks and Warren,"
College English, XV(March, 1954), 350-351, is an
interesting disagreement with the Brooks and‘Warren
view.

440

Bernard Duffey. The Chicago Renaissance $2 American Letters
(East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1954) is
valuable for the Chicago influences on Anderson's work.

Biographical Articles

Floyd Dell. "How Sherwood Anderson Became an Author,”
New York Herald-Tribune Books, XVIII (April 12, 1942),
1-2.

George H. Daugherty. "Anderson Advertising Man,"
Berkeley, No. 1 (Oct., 1944), 30-38.

Karl James Anderson. ”My Brother, Sherwood Anderson ”
Saturda Review 9; Literature, xxx: (Sept. 4, 1948),
3:77"‘ “'""_ "" '”"'

Dissertations

'William A. Sutton. Sherwood Anderson: The Fomative Years
(1816-1212) (The Ohio State University, 1945) is the
study upon which all Anderson biography must ultimately
draw.

William L. Phillips. Sherwood Anderson's Winesbur , Ohio
(University of Chicago, 1949) identifies Wifiesburg with
Clyde.

Ancillagy Works

Henry Howe. Historical Collections 3; Ohio (Norwalk, Ohio:
The Laning Printing Co., 1935).

Willis Fletcher Johnson. The Life 2§_Warren g, Harding
(N.P., 1923).

Margaret Anderson, editor. The Little Review Anthology
(New York: Hermitage House, 1953).

 

 

 

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