The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Sherwood Anderson
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
UP to the present time Mr Sherwood Anderson has published four novels, two books of short stories, and a collection of poems. He has been termed by respective critics "the Dostoevsky of America," a great and original figure in American literature, a "phallic Chekhov," and the link that at last connects the old world with that of the new. M Faÿ, in devoting an article to him in a recent French magazine, mentions his earlier stories as "purs comme l'ivoire," and, unique among contemporary American writers, he is being rapidly translated into Russian. With the final Dial award, Mr Anderson issued completely from those dim recesses hitherto penetrated only by enthusiastic critics and a small reading public, into the safely entrenched ranks of the so-called "best sellers."
Anxiously and hospitably one feels one's way through the pages of his novels in search for those especial qualities which have impelled his admirers to shower so unstintedly upon him their approval. Yet it is at the command of a voice that one finds oneself proceeding—a voice exhorting, suppliant, prophetic, simulating stridency, sentimentalizing, and dwindling at recurring moments to a bewildered whisper of inquiry. Never, no never, touching for more than a fleeting second that subtle art of restraint and aesthetic arrangement which we have come to associate with the most distinguished writing. Never, in spite of his continual use of the word "clean," which serves apparently all purposes, and plays over his pages like an agitated pawn vainly seeking equilibrium on a tilted chess board, giving one a sense of a technique sharp, pure, unmuddied by the stirred sediment of somewhat impuissant emotions. We move among wraiths of "purposeful" or "wistful" men, "straight," "fine" women or women misunderstood, or dulled beyond reprieve. Penetrating, imaginative passages there are, to be sure, an arresting use of a word here and there, a sense of the beauty of old weathered things, of the pitiless craft and hypocrisy of man in his most predatory moments. "How cunning they were, the men who had been successful in life. Behind the flesh that had grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes." And when he notes the rapid growth of Chicago as illustrated by the marks of a lumberman's ax on logs which, once part of an adjacent grove, now remain buried under the debris of a slum district crowded with warehouses, he presents with an economy of means a convincing picture which the tediousness of his later descriptions comes near to obliterating altogether. He phrases graciously his sensitiveness to country scenes, to "the smell of violets beside woodland paths, of little fragile mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of insects. . . ." Or he shows us an old woman by likening her hands as they hold a mop or broom handle to "the dried stems of a creeping vine clinging to a tree." But these chance felicities although indicative of a certain poetic sensibility in Mr Anderson are mere by-products and do not convey the real tone and temper of his work.
With the possible exception of Poor White one feels that in his Mr Anderson is subject to an ever recurring species of shell shock projects him volte face towards the prickly actualities of life, and in his efforts to regain his spiritual poise he drags one about with him in a cloud of splintering conventions and mysterious clogged desires through passages too cluttered to permit of escape into the clear light of day. Or is it, perhaps, to change our metaphor, as if Mr Anderson in a moment of somnambulism had put to sea in a row boat and being suddenly tipped over in mid-ocean manages to reach shore on a raft, having discovered in his process of escape that he has a soul, and likewise through the loss of his clothes, a body? These two facts he evulgates in his latest novel through many pages to his readers while admonishing them anxiously to help him solve the suddenly reared conflicts which sentiency always deposits at the threshold of adolescence and which only maturity through an informed scepticism can deal with adequately. And it was at this darkest moment of his maimed awakening, so one feels, that, turning to more articulate authors in search of solutions and methods, Mr Anderson permitted his own native talent to become blighted by inattention, to wilt under the glaze formed over it by the betraying phrases, thought processes, and attitudes of others. For surely this author would never have conceived alone the possibility of a mid-Western manufacturer making unmistakable love, "raping" is the word used, to his own daughter. One has but to recall Schnitzler's writings to realize with what a fleeting and delicate touch perilous motives of this kind may be suggested without offence to one's credulity or taste. And in a passage where Mr Anderson writes of the decay and corruption which ceaselessly attack life we can hardly be mistaken in detecting a resemblance to a recurring conception and manner of Mr D. H. Lawrence's, although the American author lacks just that vulture-like sharpness of insight which enables his English contemporary to arrive so often at expression, prey clutched firmly in carrion claw. It is only in turning to his short stories that we experience a grateful though guarded relief. In his Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg he has recorded in varying situations the obscure emotional states of people, wistful, restless, or maladjusted to the crass routines of life, people who do sudden strange things seeking release for thwarted desires, people who have clung lingeringly to old "pure" ideals as they passed over the puberty into a world too raw for their troubled timidities. Why does one feel, however, that these stories in spite of their eloquent reply to Main Street, in spite of their occasional charm and originality, their gentleness and pity, never fully achieve art? One has but to compare even so moving and poetically conceived a story as The New Englander to de Maupassant's Miss Harriet, of similar theme, or Senility, so like Chekhov in conception, to one of that author's delicate masterpieces, to perceive the difference between writing weakened by a groping intellect and writing that arrives radiant and ineluctable from the pens of great imaginative artists. Even Mr Theodore Dreiser, with whose name that of Mr Anderson's has been so often associated, achieves in his brooding candour a freedom from the dragging weight of self-consciousness. "I am a confused child in a confused world" writes Mr Anderson in his Mid-American Chants, but it is not from confused children, however engaging they may be, that one looks for art. And with what banalities he is content to fill his pages—"she is fine and purposeful"—"hungry to the roots of her"—"He had lived clean body and mind"—"filled with the white wonder of it."
Then why, one asks oneself, in spite of so many lapses, so much obvious awkwardness in the handling of his material, so little understanding of how the minds of certain women work under circumstances of repression, so much rhetorical self-indulgence and lack of aesthetic arrangement has Mr Anderson created for himself so large and unmistakable a following? It is, we believe, because of a certain perturbed integrity, a thwarted infantile idealism which seeks to construct a new salvation for the human race and cries out for new definitions, new sex emancipation. Where Mr Dreiser like a giant mole with strong flat hands tore up the soil and prepared the ground for a more liberal treatment of sex in American literature, Mr Anderson, nervous and mystical, follows along like the anxious white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland clasping instead of a watch the latest edition of Sigmund Freud. Dr Canby's comparison of him to John Bunyan is not, therefore, as absurd as it might seem on the surface, for there is in Sherwood Anderson a great deal of the mid-Western evangelist, an evangelist whose bigotry has been dissipated through intelligence, and whose intelligence has remained, to quote an excellent phrase of Van Wyck Brooks', "bogged and mired in adolescence." He succeeds, however, in depicting with historical perspective the disorder and meaninglessness of the American scene, the loss of our richer heritages, even while permitting such explanations to obtrude upon the development of his characters—characters which, as Mr Edmund Wilson aptly pointed out in his review of Many Marriages are, in so many instances, more like the figures in comic strips than actual human beings.
But unfortunately for American letters it must be conceded that when all has been said Sherwood Anderson taps on occasions deeper veins than almost any other of our contemporary novelists. Whether he will achieve a greater perfection in the short story, that realm of literature in which he is most at home, depends largely upon his ability to extricate himself from the debilitating influences of other writers and to think out his problems alone. At present, we feel, he somewhat resembles a man, who, having planted a fine bed of radishes, tends them rather carelessly and sells them before their time, so that when one comes at last to buy them in the open market they turn out, unfortunately, rather softer than any good radish has a right to be. To have attained their legitimate freshness and pungency they should, one strongly suspects, have been left to reach maturity in the promising and well-manured soil of Winesburg, Ohio.