BOOKS From the thick of life

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Sherwood Anderson's moment of truth at the age of thirty-six is a legend. He was sit- ting in his paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, one afternoon in the winter of 1912, dictating to his secretary, when he suddenly walked out: 'My dear young woman, it is all very silly but I have decided to no longer concern my- self with this buying and selling . . . I am going out that door and never coming back . . . I am going to sit with people, listen to words, tell tales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling'. He turned up in a Cleveland hospital four days later, suffering from amnesia and what the doctors diagnosed as 'nervous collapse'.

This myth that Anderson himself estab- lished of his escape from a soulless commercialism to creative freedom con- tained an element of truth. He did eventu- ally reject the non-values of his existence as an advertising copywriter and salesman to become a writer. But he had been struggling to write for some years before 1912—his first two novels originate from this period— and he did not give up copywriting until 1923, even though he flaunted his contempt for it. Superficially, the businessman Ander- son was not very different from his neigh- bours: public churchgoer and private out- of-town brothel visitor, country club mem- ber, and so on. But in the privacy of an attic, out of the way of his university- educated first wife who was always inform- ing him that he was not at all the sort of person who could ever become a man of letters, he indulged himself in what at first seemed like fantasies but later revealed themselves as creative realities.

Although the moment of his walking out of his office understandably came to sym- bolise for Anderson his dramatic escape from the non-ideals of materialistic America, the incident was really the result of a mental breakdown occasioned by domestic tension and financial anxiety; his later accounts ignored both these elements in favour of the myth. And this falsification, innocent enough on his own part, led first to his being lion- ised as a great anti-philistine and enemy of Babbittry, but later to his being attacked and subsequently neglected, as a crude apostle of 'instinct'.

For a time Anderson as a writer fell victim to his own false reputation. Dark Laughter (1925), his creative nadir, with its embarrassing attempted imitation of Joyce and its self-conscious 'modernity', deserved the attack Wyndham Lewis made on it in Paleface. (His tenth book, this was, ironic- ally, the first that made him money: with it he was forced to abandon B. W. fluebsch for a publisher, Horace Liveright, who could sell his books more widely.) He slipped out of the mainstream of American life, built a house in Virginia, made a fourth and this time happy marriage, ran two local news- papers—one Republican and one Demo- crat—suffered from occasional black de- pressions because he could not sucieed in writing satisfactory novels, but remained relatively undisturbed by the critical hos- tility that had developed towards his writing.

By the time he died of peritonitis in 1941, while on his way to South America on an unofficial goodwill tour, he was a distin- guished public figure; but his literary reputa- tion remained on the decline—nor has it in the succeeding quarter of a century shown any serious sign of re-ascending. The literary world has been content to continue to over- value his ungrateful imitator Hemingway, a more pretentious as well as an inferior writer, and to ignore the nature of the achievement of one of his masters.

The fashionable case against Anderson was stated by Lionel Trilling in his obituary notice, which he saw fit to reprint, with additional material, in The Liberal Imagina- tion. This is an inaccurate, unfair and patronising piece—even where it praises it refuses to give reasons—but it provides an apt demonstration of the kind of hostility Anderson's work aroused and still arouses amongst the literary establishment. Trilling is an academic rationalist with about as little time for either religion or uncertainty as an intelligent man can have. His attack on Anderson is an attack by a frightened intel- lectual on 'feeling' and 'instinct', in which the man and the writer Anderson often completely disappears, or is represented simply as the misled populist and vitalist who wrote Marching Men (1917) and Dark Laughter.

Trilling allows the connected series of stories that comprises Winesburg, Ohio (1919) a 'touch of greatness', but cannot bring himself to explain this concession; meanwhile he challenges it by stating that Anderson is an enemy of mind and of re- sponsibility (he reprehensibly quotes Wynd- ham Lewis on Dark Laughter as Lewis on Anderson in general; but Lewis, signifi- cantly, never discussed Winesburg, Ohio), whose characters are unloved by their author and unreal in themselves. The only excuse for him is that he reflected the wretched cultural situation of his time (before, one may legitimately suspect, the rationalist Columbia Professor came along to provide a usable working model of Things As They Really Are, by E. M. Forster out of Freud).

But Anderson amounts to very much more than this mean-minded and unworthy, but widely circulated, appraisal implies. It is not only the incomparable achievement of Winesburg, Ohio and of some other stories in his three succeeding collections, The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923) and Death in the Woods (1933), that Trilling ignores; concentrating gleefully on the novelistic failures of the 'twenties and 'thirties (and incidentally not mentioning Poor White, 1920, which is in part a success), Trilling also ignores Anderson's later auto- biographical writings. At the time he had some excuse. In 1942 Anderson's friend and admirer Paul Rosenfeld gathered together, re-arranged and largely rewrote a series of published and unpublished autobiographical sketches in a volume called Sherwood Ander- son's Memoirs.

Devotee of Anderson though he was, Rosenfeld's book can only be described as a travesty and a bibliographical monstrosity. Ray Lewis White has rightly jettisoned it altogether in his impeccable Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs: A Critical Edition

(University of North Carolina Press/ow' 145s), which returns as closely as possible to Anderson's own final drafts of the auto- biography he worked at, on and off, through- out the 'thirties, and annotates them with fascinating fullness. Some episodes in Ander-

son's life—for example, his third marriage— are missing or are to be found in the less satisfying A Story Teller's Story (1924); the

book is all too obviously unfinished; but it nonetheless represents the best writing of Anderson's last twenty years, and makes available for the first time in a proper con- text such masterpieces of autobiographical

writing as White Spot, one of the most un-

sentimental and beautiful accounts of feel- ing in a casual sexual encounter ever written,

and Trumpeter, which tells of the period

immediately preceding Anderson's break- down in Elyria in November 1912. It should lead without further delay to the 'proper evaluation' that Faulkner asked for in 1956, when he affirmed that Anderson 'was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on'.

For a seminal and a highly original book Winesburg, Ohio had some strangely obvi-

ous sources. Its structure was that of

Masters' Spoon River Anthology, its pseudo- oral style that of Mark Twain, its character- isation reminiscent of Turgenev's A Sports- man's Sketches, its tone frequently that of E. W. Howe's bleakly pessimistic The Story of a Country Town (1883). And yet Ander- son's own voice came and still comes straight off the page; for all the archaisms and clumsinesses that analysis reveals, the book proceeds as naturally as the corn—its fre- quent symbol—grows. The narrator is as be- wildered as his (mostly) sick characters, but he affirms that the world is there, he takes joy in the small realities upon which he so brilliantly focuses—the roving hands of an innocent homosexual, the left eyelid of an eccentric doctor ...

The book arose from Anderson's notion that man had rejected an eclectic view of existence—a multiplicity of contradictory truths—and grasped at single truths which, when he appropriated them, made him into a grotesque. In describing this process in Winesburg, Ohio Anderson tapped a funda- mental vein, and achieved a brand of lyrical scepticism that, however repulsive it may be to Trilling—a rationalist who finds the idea of any uncertainty an intolerable burden— anticipated the concerns of a whole genera- tion of future writers.

There is little or nothing about the specific pressure of industrial life on human inno- cence in Winesburg, Ohio; it was in his later novels that Anderson sometimes tried to adopt the role of prophet and mystic. But in writing of his own life he demonstrated the untruth of Trilling's charge that 'what exasperates us is his stubborn, satisfied con- tinuance in his earliest attitudes'. It is the virtue of his memoirs that they continually and meaningfully illuminate the conflict be- tween public and private values; they throw

more light on the nature of society than Trilling would care to admit. They are by a man of integrity, written from the thick of life, in his own voice. One can hardly praise them more highly than that.