HE SAID IT OF HIMSELF. He saw himself curled up, busily feeding on midwestern America, sheltered, destructive, loving his host, and needed by this age and place in order that they could get some sense of buoyancy and carry within them the richness of growth. He recognized his own childish self-absorption, great even for an artist, a breed accused by everyone of being childishly self-absorbed. Therefore he wrote about death with praise because “it will in any case give us escape from this disease of self.” Self-love is surely the beginning of the love of others, but it is only the beginning. Sherwood Anderson, an old child, suffered a merely erratic love of himself, therefore writhed with a tormented love of others. All his stories are bound up in this sense of the self’s isolation, seen as glory and sickness, as sickness and glory. He is one of the purest, most intense poets of loneliness—the loneliness of being an individual and of being buffeted in the current, the loneliness of isolation and that of being swallowed. One type represents the traditional retreat into the self for self-possession; the other, and its adversary at times, arises out of the angry resentment of a sensible man in an assembly-line civilization. Anderson’s work is a manual of the ways in which loneliness can be used. It was his nourishment and sometimes his poison.
“I pour a dream over it.... I want to write beautifully, create beautifully, not outside but in this thing in which I am born, in this place where, in the midst of ugly towns, cities, Fords, moving pictures, I have always lived, must always live.” Yet he fled it always. He fled in order to find himself, then prayed to flee that disease of self, to become “beautiful and clear ... plangent and radiant.” He felt that he loved only the midwestern land and people, but was still fleeing when he died—in the Panama Canal Zone.
In his photographs he often showed his hair hanging over his eyes. The affectation means a great deal: first mere arty affectation (how he loved the “free spirits” of Greenwich Village and New Orleans!), then something feminine and wanting to be pretty and lovable for prettiness, and then of course the blurring of sight when you try to see through your own hair. What do you see? A world organized by your hair. “I must snap my finger at the world. . . . I have thought of everyone and everything.” His sympathy and his oceanic feelings alternate with arrogant despair in which the arrogance can deceive no one. So desperately hurt he is, trying so hard to convince the “word-fellows” he wanted to admire him. But then his nostalgia gives us the mood he sought to force: “... old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big, empty plains. It has taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet. It affected their whole lives. It made them significant.”
We understand him at last!
And then again the helpless bombast: “At my best, brother, I am like a great mother bird. . . .” He exuded through his pores the ferocious longing of a giant of loneliness. The typical chords from his letters sound under the changing heroes of the stories:
Youth not given a break—youth licked before it starts.
Filled with sadness that you weren’t there.
I have a lot I want to tell you if I can. . . . Anyway you know what I mean when we talked of a man working in the small, trying to save a little of the feeling of man for man.
The romantic sentimentalist held up his mirror to look at his world, peered deeply, saw himself instead, of course; wrote painfully about what he saw; and it turned out that he was writing about the world after all, squeezing it by this palpitating midwestern honesty out of his grandiose sorrows and longings. Sometimes, anyway. He was not a pure man; he had a kind of farmer cunning, plus his groaning artiness and pretense, with which he hoped to convince the “word-fellows” and the pretty girls that he was a Poet although not a young one. What he really wanted was to be alone in that succession of gray furnished rooms he talked about so eloquently, making immortal the quiet noise and gentle terror of his childhood. “I try to believe in beauty and innocence in the midst of the most terrible clutter.” But clutter too was the truth of his life; he fed on it; how else does a poet take the measure of his need for “beauty and innocence”? He must have remained an optimist, too, amidst all his disillusion. He married four times. To the end of his life he went on believing, and marrying.
Anderson the writer arouses a poking curiosity about Anderson the man even in the most resolutely detached critic. The note of confession is always with us: Here I am, it’s good that you know! he seems to be saying.
His most formal narrative paragraphs are soaked in his own groping speech. He repeats, he cries out, he harangues, he pleads. All his work, the absymal failures and the successes which have helped to construct the vision Americans have of themselves, represents an innocent, factitious, improvised, schemed reflection and elaboration of the elements of his own life. He turns the private into the public and then back into the private again. His mystery as a man remains despite his childish longing to reveal himself—the mystery of a man who looks at a man with a beard and a scar in a conference room and sees, instead, a lover fleeing his girl’s brothers through the fields. (They had knives and slashed—could this be the same man? he asks himself.) Anderson confounds us with bombast and wit, tenderness and softheadedness, rant and exquisite delicacy.
The best of his work is what matters.
Let us now look more closely at what the worm made of his apple.
He loved to create, he loved his fantasy as the lonely boy does. In his best work, as in some of the stories of Winesburg, Ohio, the fantasy is most controlled, or if not exactly controlled, simplified, given a single lyrical line. The novels had trouble passing the test of the adult imagination, being wild proliferations of daydream. The simple stories of Kate Swift (“The Teacher”) or Wing Biddlebaum (“Hands”) join Sherwood Anderson with the reader’s sense of wonder and despair at the pathetic in his own past—childish hope of love, failed ambition, weakness and loneliness. As music can do, such stories liberate the fantasies of our secret lives. However, musicians will agree that music is for listening, not to be used as a stimulus for fantasy. We must attend to the song itself, not take advantage of it and make it the passive instrument of our dreaming. In the same way, the great writers hope to arouse and lead the reader’s imagination toward a strong individual perspective on experience. Sherwood Anderson, however, was not of that vividly individualistic company, despite his personal hobby of eccentric bohemianism. Rather, he was the dreamy, sad romantic within each of us, evoking with nostalgia and grief the bitter moments of recognition which have formed him—formed all of us in our lonely America.
James Joyce used the word epiphany, which he took from Catholic ritual, to name that moment of revelation when words and acts come together to manifest something new, familiar, timeless, the deep summation of meaning. The experience of epiphany is characteristic of great literature, and the lyric tales of Anderson give this wonderful rapt coming-forth, time and time again.
In “The Untold Lie,” for example, two men tenderly meet in order to talk about whether one, the younger, should marry the girl he has made pregnant. The older man, unhappy in his own marriage, wants to see the young man’s life free and charged with powerful action as his own has never been. But it is revealed to him—revelation is almost always the climax of Anderson’s stories—that life without wife and children is impossible and that one man’s sorrows cannot be used by him to prevent another man from choosing the same sorrows. It would be a lie to say that the life of conjugal sorrows is merely a life of conjugal sorrows: the story finally breathes the sadness, the beauty, the necessary risks of grown-up desire. “Whatever I told him would have been a lie,” he decides. Each man has to make his own decisions and live out his chosen failures of ideal freedom.
Many of Anderson’s stories take for their realization objective circumstances which have a grandiose folkish quality, and many of both the most impressive and the most mawkish are concerned with an archetypical experience of civilization: the test which, successfully passed, commands manhood. Such a story as “The Man Who Became a Woman” objectifies even in its title the boy’s wondering and fearful dream. The end sought is manliness, that new clean and free life; failure is seen as a process of being made effeminate, or falling into old patterns of feeling and action. At his best in these stories, there is a physical joy in triumph which is fresh, clean, genial—we think of Mark Twain, although a Twain without the robust humor; at his weak moments, we may also think of the sentimental sick Twain, and we find also the maundering moping of a prettified Thomas Wolfe.
The line between the subjects of Anderson’s stories and Sherwood Anderson himself is barely drawn. His relation as artist to his material, as shaper of his material, is as intense and personal as that of any modern writer. Unlike most writing dealing with unhappy and frustrated people, Anderson’s work is absolutely authentic in the double sense—not merely in communicating the feeling of these people as people, but also in giving us the conviction that the author shares both their bitter frustration and their evanescent occasional triumphs. By comparison with Sherwood Anderson, Dostoevski is a monument of cool detachment. His identification is perfect, sometimes verging on the morbid: “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” He has a primitive idealism, a spoiled romanticism like that of Rousseau: we could be all innocent and pure in our crafts if the machines of America and the fates that bring machines did not cripple us.
This romantic idealism can be illustrated again by his treatment of another theme, marriage, in the story “Loneliness,” in which he writes of Enoch Robinson: “Two children were born to the woman he married,”—just as if they did not happen to Robinson at all, which is indeed the truth about the self-isolated personality he describes. “He dismissed the essence of things,” Anderson can write, “and played with realities.” Again the romantic Platonist sees a conflict between the deepest meaning and the fact of our lives, between what we do and what we “really” are. With a kind of purity and cunning, Anderson seems to thrive on this curiously boyish notion the limitations of which most of us quickly learn. We work and love because we know that there is no other way to be ourselves than in relation to the rest of the world. The kind man is the man who perform kind acts; the generous man is a man who behaves generously; we distrust the “essential” generosity which is sometimes claimed for the soul of a man who selfishly watches out only for himself. And yet we can be reminded with a strange force by Anderson’s conviction in his boyish dream of isolated personality that there is something totally private, untouchable, beyond appearance and action, in all of us. The observation is a familiar one, but the experience can be emotionally crucial. Cunningly Anderson makes us turn to ourselves again with some of his own purity.
The last sentence of “Departure” says of George Willard: “Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” Abstracted people, playing out their time in the fragmentary society of Winesburg, these “heroes” are isolated, as Anderson himself was isolated, by art or unfulfilled love or religion—by the unsurmounted challenge of finding the self within relationship with others. It was the deep trouble of Anderson’s own life that he saw his self, which could be realized only by that monstrous thing, the Life of Art, as flourishing in opposition to decent connections with others in society. Marriage, work, friendship were beautiful things; but the gray series of furnished slum rooms, in which he wrote, enough rooms to fill a city, were his real home. Writing letters and brooding behind his locked door, he idealized love, he idealized friendship. He withdrew to the company of phantom creatures. He hoped to guard his integrity. He kept himself the sort of childman he described with such comprehending sympathy in the character of Enoch Robinson.
In many writers dealing with the grim facts of our lives, the personal sense of triumph at encompassing the material adds a note of confidence which is at variance with the story itself. Hemingway is a good example; his heroes go down to defeat, but Papa Hemingway the chronicler springs eternal. In Anderson this external note of confidence and pride in craft is lacking, except in some of the specious, overwilled novels which he wrote under political influences. Generally he does not import his poetry into the work—he allows only the poetry that is there—nor does his independent life as a creator come to change the tone of these sad tales. The stories of Winesburg are unselfconsciously committed to him as he is sworn true to them; the identification—a variety of loyalty—is torturingly complete; he is related to his material with a love that lacks esthetic detachment and often lacks the control which comes with that detachment. They are practically unique in this among modern storytelling, and it is partially this that gives them their sometimes embarrassing, often tormenting and unforgettable folk quality. Still they are not folk tales but, rather, pseudo folk tales. The romantic longing and grieving is not characteristic of the folk tale, despite the other elements, a direct matter-of-fact storytelling, colloquial American language (complicated by chivalry and the Bible, but at its best not “literary”), and the authority of Anderson’s priestly devotion to his lives and people. Later, of course, the romantic judgment culminated in rebellion, sometimes in a kind of esthetic rant against the way things are.
In “The Strength of God,” the Reverend Curtis Hart-man (as in a parable, Heart-man) “wondered if the flame of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would tremble before the spirit of God made manifest in him. ‘I am a poor stick and that will never really happen to me,’ he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit up his features. ‘Oh well, I suppose I’m doing well enough,’ he added philosophically.”
These, as The New Yorker would put it, are musings that never got mused and philosophic additions that never got philosophically added. They have a curious archaic directness that amounts to a kind of stylization. The un-analytic simplicity itself is a sophisticated manner. As the officer of the Pharisees said, “Never man spake like this man.” It recalls to us the day of the storyteller who suggested the broad line of an action, and allowed us to give our imaginations to it. Nowadays we demand detail upon detail, and the phrase “I am a poor stick” would require a chapter of exposition in the hands of a typical contemporary novelist.
The pathos of the pious man’s temptation by the flesh has a flavor beautifully evocative of adolescence. We no longer think of “carnal temptation” as Anderson did. But we remember our fears and guilts, and are reminded of ourselves as great literature always reminds us. Hartman’s silent, secret battle with himself over Kate Swift is given part of its bite by her own story—this pimply, passionate young schoolteacher who strikes beauty without knowing it and can find no one to speak to her. Her story is told with a brilliant delicacy that reflects Anderson’s own reticence about women. Enoch Robinson, he says, “tried to have an affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging house.” To have an affair is his strange idiom for a pickup! (The boy got frightened, and ran away; the woman roared with laughter and picked up someone else.)
Except for the poetic schoolteacher and a very few others, women are not women in Anderson’s stories. There are the girls who suffer under the kind of sensitivity, passion, and lonely burning which was Anderson’s own lot; and then there are the Women. For Anderson women possess holy power; they are earth-mothers, ectoplasmic spirits, sometimes succubi, rarely individual living creatures. In “Hands” they are not girls but “maidens,” where the word gives a quaint archaic charm to the creature who taunts poor, damned, lonely Wing Biddlebaum. The berry-picking “maidens” gambol while the boys are “boisterous,” and the hero flutters in his tormented realm between the sexes.
In somewhere like Wing Biddlebaum’s tormented realm, Sherwood Anderson also abode. American cities, as he wrote, are “noisy and terrible,” and they fascinated him. He got much of the noise and terror into his writing about big cities, and the quiet noise and gentle terror of little towns into his stories about them. And among the fright of materialistic life, he continually rediscovered the minor beauties which made life possible for him—the moment of love, of friendship, of self-realization. That they were but moments is not entirely the fault of Anderson’s own character.
Anderson is shrewd, sometimes just, and has earned the right to even the unjust judgments he makes of other writers. How earned them? He was constantly fighting through both the questions of craft and the deeper risks of imagination. He has won the right to make sweeping pronouncements on his peers. Of Sinclair Lewis, for example, he offers the most damning, most apt criticism: “Wanting to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm, he has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold.” Sherwood Anderson wants the same thing, but holds to the good sense which a poet can still have in a difficult time: he clings to the minor beauties which give tenderness to his longing, a hope of something else to his despair. For this reason Anderson’s critique of America finally bites more deeply than the novels of the ferocious sentimental satirist who was his contemporary.
Of Henry James, Anderson wrote that he is a man who “never found anyone to love, who did not dare love. . . . Can it be that he is the novelist of the haters? Oh, the thing infinitely refined and carried far into the field of intellectuality, as skillful haters find out how to do.” The Jamesian flight from direct fleshly feeling offended Anderson. James objectified, stipulated, laid bare, and then suffused his entire yearning personality over all his work, so that Isabel Archer and Hyacinth Robinson are, really are Henry James, in all his hopeless longing, and yet spiritualized, that is, without body, epicene as James seems to have made himself in real life. George Santayana believed that by withholding love from a specific object it could be given “in general” to the whole world. This is a curiously commercial, economical notion—the idea that there is a limited amount of love and that we have the choice of spending it on a few selfishly chosen objects or distributing it generally. “In general” we know that this is nonsense; our attachments to individuals are the models for our attachments to humanity as an ideal; but like many sorts of nonsense, it worked for Henry James to the extent that he really loved some spirit of Art which his “puppets,” his “fables,” as he called them, served.
Is Anderson, with all his mid-American distrust of intellectualized love, really so far from Henry James? He is strikingly the perpetual adolescent in love with love rather than with a specific girl with changing flesh. One can see him dreaming after his dream-girl even as he approached old age. His romantic chivalry, his lust for the proletariat, his fantastic correspondence in which the letters seem to be written to himself, no matter how touching their apparent candor and earnest reaching out—is he perhaps the other side of the coin of his accusation against Henry James? To be the novelist of lovers who did not dare to hate—this too is a limitation. He seems obliged to love others as a function of his own faulty self-love, and therefore his love of others seems willed, therefore incomplete, and his moments of hatred seem a guilty self-indulgence. He presents an extreme case of the imperfections of an artist just because of the disparity between his intentions and his performance. He wanted to love, he wanted to sing of love. His failures help to make still more brilliant his achievements in certain of the stories of Winesburg, in “The Egg,” and in scattered paragraphs, stories, and sections of novels.
For the fault of bookish derivations for his feelings, Anderson substituted at his worst the fault of self-indulgent derivation from gratifications and dreads never altered after boyhood. He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast as he walked out of his factory into the life of art. The primitive emotions of childhood are the raw material of all poetry. Sometimes the indulgence of them to the exclusion of the mature perspectives of adult life prevents Anderson from equaling his aspiration and own best work.
But this is a vain quibble. Who can do his best work always? What counts is the achievement, not the failures, however exemplary they may seem to a critic. “I have a lot I want to tell you if I can,” he wrote in a letter. “I am writing short stories.” The faults of unevenness, egotism, lazy acceptance of ideals, and romantic self-glorification are as nothing against the realized works of art which force their way through. Sherwood Anderson “added to the confusion of men,” as he said of the great financiers and industrialists, the Morgans, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, “by taking on the air of a creator.” He has helped to create the image we have of ourselves as Americans. Curtis Hartman, George Willard, Enoch Robinson, all of the people of Winesburg, haunt us as do our neighbors, our friends, our own secret selves which we first met one springtime in childhood. 1957