III
LITTERATEURS: AMERICAN WRITERS
A Story Teller’s Story, by Sherwood Anderson.
William Dean Howells, by Oscar W. Firkins.
Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days, by Edward Larocque Tinker.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography.
Henry Thoreau, by Leon Bazalgette.
The Pilgrimage of Henry James, by Van Wyck Brooks.
The next best thing to talking about ourselves is talking about others. Hence the lure of autobiographies, biographies, and autobiographical fiction. James Joyce wrote a book half the size of Webster’s Dictionary to tell of a few hours in his own life, and Ben Hecht seemingly cannot exhaust himself. The genesis and development of personality can be conveyed only by words. Palette and brush in master hands can preserve for posterity the lineaments, and in a measure the character, of those we love and those the world admires or fears; but the written word alone is the medium to convey the soul. Sherwood Anderson has laid bare his soul in A Story Teller’s Story, and he has drawn a portrait of his father that surpasses Velasquez’ Innocent VI.
Rarely have autistic and purposeful thinking, revery and directed mental activity, been so skilfully displayed, so successfully made vocal. In the lines, and between the lines, Mr. Anderson has told all he knows about himself and more. He has put psychologists and writers, be they Freudians or behaviourists, subjectivists or objectivists, under obligation to him, for he has permitted them to observe the gestation and travail of the poet’s fancy, the birth and growth of poetical form. His story, taken with Mr. Stieglitz’s portrait, tells all there is to know about a creature at once as simple as the heart of a child and as complex as the mid-brain of an adult who first saw the light of day in Camden, Ohio, nearly half a century ago.
He knows little of his ancestry, but that little goes a long way to explain him. His father, a fifty-fifty mixture of Colonel Sellers and Wilkins Micawber, born in the South and given to rum, romancing, and revery, was once a dandy and always a hokum expert. The origin of his mother, who had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family until she married, was something of a mystery, which her children did not care to solve; but she was kind, indulgent, faithful, and she suffered fools silently. Her mother was an Italian peasant, one eyed, polyandrous, and at times murderous. Once a tramp tried to rob her humble home. She beat him until he begged for mercy; then she filled him and herself with hard cider and the two went singing off together down the road. Marvellous germ-and sperm-plasm for a poet; wondrous parentage for one destined to be absorbed by the visual fancies of his unconscious, to see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire with William Blake. No wonder Sherwood Anderson has often been called a “nut.” He is not averse to being thought a little insane, but he has been stung to the quick by charges of “personal immorality.” One with such ancestry is perhaps not so likely to be an invert as a poet, but it is from similar ancestry that they both not infrequently come. Had Mr. Anderson investigated the forebears of Judge Turner who found the boys of his town were not of his sort and was unable to understand them, who had never married, and indeed cared nothing for women, he would have found them in many respects similar to his own. The judge was very congenial to him, despite the disparity of age. They saw many things eye to eye; and the short, fat, neatly dressed man with bald head, white Van Dyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks, and extraordinarily small hands and feet, is as typical an example of the strange genesic anomaly as was M. de Charlus whose acquaintance we made in Marcel Proust’s much discussed Swann’s Way. To understand the long, long thoughts the judge had when as a boy he meditated poisoning some of his schoolmates, one must either have “temperament” and “fixations” like Mr. Anderson’s or else be a psychiatrist.
A Story Teller’s Story is full of portraits, mostly miniature, but here and there is a life-size done with a few sweeps of the brush. Such is that of Alonzo Berner, from whom Mr. Anderson learned as much about men as Mr. Kipling did about women from the “arf caste widow, the woman at Prome, the wife of the head groom or the girl at home.” Alonzo did not have that contempt for men that Sherwood had. He knew the great commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; he had learned there was none other greater; and it was vouchsafed him to believe. “Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?” You got it, Sherwood, from the one-eyed grandmother who tried to kill her granddaughter with a butcher knife, who had four husbands and was ready for a fifth. Alonzo escaped it through the father who had, the night the stallion Peter Point died, “some thought about most human beings, including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot.”
Next to the evolution of the artist, the determination of Sherwood Anderson to be a writer, the transformation from slug laborer to chrysalis writer, these analyses are best in a book which is all excellent.
Freudians will find Mr. Anderson’s story of his life corroborative of their teachings. Fanciful birth, vicarious parentage, fantasying childhood, reverying manhood, sexual fixation, self-observation, unconscious fantasy following in the wake of conscious thought, conflict between authority and desire—all these and more are here. Rather than dwell upon them, and upon his artistic temperament, rather than attempt a summary of his conduct which would represent his strivings toward the beautiful, I shall discuss what may be called his urge to authorship. The most remarkable thing about it is that it did not seize him until comparatively late in life. What it lost in forwardness it made up in intensity. After having lived nearly one-half of the life of man as a laborer and business man, he began to write.
“There never was such a mighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words, always gladdens me ... oh, what glorious times I have had sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villain foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honour; what fair women I have loved, and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, and open-hearted and fine I have been!”
The song chanted by Solomon that has come down the ages to testify that the wisest of men was also a poet, is not more pregnant with sincerity, no more redolent of fervor than Mr. Anderson’s record of his art which he sought in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stars. By night on his bed he sought it; he sought it in city streets and country fields, from watchman and from barman, only to find it finally within himself; in his own creating, shaping intellect into which the unconscious had projected its own grist. He began to write of his observations, experiences, and fantasies; and as he wrote he seasoned them more and more generously with his aspiration: to cause his fellow men to share his love of beauty, to thrust beauty first upon the middle west and then upon the U. S. A., to show that happiness and prosperity are not synonymous. He was by nature a word-fellow who could at most any time, be hypnotised by high-sounding words, and he was to come under the influence of Gertrude Stein, a “surefire” verbal artist; all of this resulted in Many Marriages, which was the life of the author strung on a fictional clothes horse. John Webster’s grand geste in fiction is Sherwood Anderson’s in reality. It came to him like a revelation; it came with a rush: the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness engendered by buying or selling. “I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyed him. The corrupt unspeakable thing that happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying and selling.” And so he walked out of his factory saying to his secretary, “You may have it, I am not coming back any more.” As he walked along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of the town, he whispered to himself, “Oh, you tricky little words, you are my brothers and for the rest of my life I will be a servant to you.”