A Book of New Aspects*

A Book of New Aspects

Some Adventures in Nudity The Story. John Webster, small-town manufacturer of second-rate washing-machines, falls in love with his stenographer and runs away with her. He leaves behind him a bovine, 17-year-old daughter and a stodgy wife, who immediately poisons herself. He has an unaccountable tendency to take off his clothes, with or without provocation. He introduces the subject of his prospective elopement by parading up and down his room, characteristically naked, before a picture of the Virgin, until his wife and daughter come in, find him, and think him crazy. He is inclined to agree with them. So is the reader.

The Significance. With this aggressively commonplace plot and in a style painstakingly simple, Mr. Anderson attempts the well-nigh impossible. His object is to show, through John Webster's experience, the mystery and miracle of the commonplace seen with the vision of inspiration. John Webster's love gives the world new aspects. The fronts of houses seem to have fallen away, and he can see the lives of the people in them. Every episode, every object, takes on for him a fresh beauty. He tries to give some of this sudden light to his wife and daughter. To the former he tries to

recall the one moment of perfect beauty between them, when he met

(both of them, of course, naked) for the first time. But they had both ruined that moment by hypocrisy and shame, and the life in her soul had been killed. With the daughter he is slightly more successful. She begins to see the vision, with him, of a world transformed by love, divested of sham, in which everyone sees behind the cloak of the actual to the reality of the spirit, and in which minds commerce freely with each other. That is what he meant by love--a marriage of the spirit, in which one individual for a long or short period, saw deeply into the inner life of the other.

The appeal of the book is extremely limited. To the general reader it is bound to be about equally dull, confusing, ridiculous, and shocking. It is a book compounded in equal parts of the most painfully literal and the most elusively symbolic. The combination is a shade trying. And there is an irritating lack of humor. It is hard to sympathize with anyone who takes himself as seriously as do both Mr. Anderson and his hero. It is altogether too easy to allow one's sense of the ab- surdity of a good many of its episodes to cloud one's perception of the beauty underlying them. It is hard to read it through with a straight face. The Critics. Many Marriages appeared first in The Dial It was hailed by the extremely advanced as another of the yearly crop of "great American novels." Since its publication in book form its reception has been uneven. It is an easy book to rave over and an even easier one at which to laugh. A few of the unintelligently prurient have been shocked by its plain speaking. F. P. A., of The New York World, was bored by it. So were Burton Rascoe, of The New York Tribune, and Edmund Wilson, Jr., of The Dial. Dr. Henry Seidel Canby,_ of The Literary Review, regards it as " a new Pilgrim's Progress." His praise is not quite unqualified, but he says of Mr. Anderson: "If we are to have an American Hardy, he is the man."

The Author. Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, 0. He is 47 years old, has been married since 1916 to Tennessee Anderson, the sculptress. His home is in Chicago, but he is at present on a lecture tour of the Middle West. He was edu-cated in the public schools. His better known works, prior to Many Marriages are: Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White; The Triumph of the Egg.

* Many Marriages--Sherwood Anderson--Huebach.