Sherwood Anderson

He Splays the Emotions

Sherwood Anderson is an enigmatic figure in American letters ; for there are critics of equal note who find in him little more than vague, abstruse, some what vulgar meanderings. There are those who consider him possessed of great beauty of style, others who see in his sentences grotesque and jumbled collections of words, those who find a sort of visionary health in his philosophy, others who pronounce his ideas those of a decided psychopath. Cham pioned by H. L. Mencken, by The Dial, by even so conservative a critic as Henry Canby, he is a man who must be reckoned with. No one, I believe, questions his genuine sincerity, and there are many who believe that time will find him the great prose genius of our age.

That he does not quite know what he is trying to say, that he does not quite understand himself, that he is over-impressed by Freudian psychology and sex symbols, that he is overfond of dwelling on the pathological and perverted, that all this belongs in the medical laboratory rather than in the ranks of literature--that is my general opinion. However, I must say that I am frequently caught by what I do feel is, occasionally, a beautifully rhythmical style, and, at his unpleasantest, some times, a singularly moving power, as in I Want to Know Why, Brothers and many of the Wineburg, Ohio sketches. But it is inchoate, stumbling, strange; and art, after all, must, I fancy, be more clear-cut than this, must be, in Anglo-Saxon literature at least, most carefully cerebrated. We cannot indulge in such splaying of the emotions.

Anderson, as I remember, is part Italian. He is a stocky, quiet, soft-voiced man, with great dark gentle eyes. I fancy he has spent most of his life being patient, then suddenly running away from life with an elaborate and perhaps unnecessary gesture. He was born at Camden, Ohio, where he was educated in the public schools. Later he worked as a laborer, fought in the Spanish-American War, wrote advertising copy, won The Dial Prize, attained a vogue in advanced literary circles, was married twice. He recently sued his second wife for divorce, charging her with desertion.

Anderson is definitely associated with Chicago and its literary circle. Perhaps he has been somewhat pampered by that fond parental influence. But his is a remote and gloomy influence, springing, alas, more from translated Russian novels than from the drama indigenous to Middle West wheat fields and the strenuosities of the stockyards.

J.F.