SHERWOOD ANDERSON: 1876-1941

Dr. PREMA NANDAKUMAR

Sherwood Anderson, the novelist par excellence, of the industrial era in America sounds perfectly contemporaneous to the Indian reader today, and his easy flowing English style continues to be a source of relaxation for the tired in mind and spirit. Then, he is something more too, as he traverses the borderland between prose and verse to explore the psyche within and makes us face the truth about ourselves. His name is rightly associated with D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein, for according to Horace Gregory, “each gives the reader (and beyond this their kinship ends) a vision usually reserved for readers of poetry alone, a view of life, familiar to be sure in ‘realistic’ detail, but far more ‘alive’ than the resources of prose and of fiction commonly permit.”

Even in an age dominated by stalwart literary names, Sherwood Anderson stands out as a popular and serious writer. In his autobiographical writings and especially in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson recorded the youth of his America with folksy humour and exquisite simplicity. This is mainly because his own rich inner life flowed into his writings with himself as the leading personality donning many fictional garbs. This again was due to the fact that he was the first creative writer to be actively influenced by Freud’s theories and the interaction of Freudian psychology and creative imagination.

Sherwood Anderson was born on 13th September 1876, the son of a harness-maker and house-painter. One of seven children, the house was full of laughter and colour in spite of the declining family fortunes and the emotional problems of one’s childhood Anderson had no schooling. But his enthusiastic readiness at taking up odd jobs-newspaper vendor, field hand, stable boy, factory worker–gave him an education suited to the work he was to take up later, that of a creative writer. He took part in the Spanish-American War in 1898-’99. After his discharge became a successful businessman in Ohio and Chicago, got married and began his writing career as a contributor to The Little review. 1916 saw the publication of his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son. Anderson gained overwhelming popularity with the novel Poor White which was preceded by the significant volume of tales, Winesburg, Ohio. He received the Dial Award in 1921 and holidayed in Europe. At about this time he also gained the friendship of literary personalities like Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht and William Faulkner. Dark Laughter was published in 1925 and earned him a handsome profit. He began to go on lecture tours and became a busy journalist.

This bare outline of dates can be terribly misleading as Anderson’s inner life was a complex battlefield of warring emotions. He grew up at a time when philosophers like Thoreau, Ingersoll and Emerson were being absorbed by America’s youth with eagerness. Then, of course, there was Sigmund Freud. Anderson suffered a nervous breakdown in 1912 and had himself psycho-analysed. In 1921 he had met James Joyce and Gertrude Stein who enthused him in the art of digging up the sub-conscious. The complex shades of his personality flowed into his private life. He married four times. A good deal of his work is concerned with the problem of woman and the debasement of sex. His masterpiece, Death in the Woods crystallises his lifetime’s experiences and inner struggles in the symbol of the worn-out old woman found dead in the woods.

“She did not look old, lying there in that light, frozen and still. One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything. My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my brother’s. It might have been the cold. Neither of us had ever seen a woman’s body before. It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white and lovely, so like marble.”

Repulsed by the debasement of sex in everyday life and overtly sympathising with the lot of women, he burst a thematic bomb-shell in this short story. Exploring his own creative methodology here Anderson wrote:

“It seems to me that the theme of the story is the persistent animal hunger of man. There are these women who spend their whole lives, rather dumbly, feeding this hunger. For years I wanted to write this story.

As for the technique, it was quite definitely thought out...For example, I thought it necessary to...lift the animal hunger, I wanted to get at, out of the realm of sex. Therefore my tired out, sexless old woman, the dogs feeding from the food attached to her body after her own death.”

Though Anderson was such a serious technician at times, his novels appear shapeless. His heroes are like Ulysses adventuring into new fields of thinking restless with their present situation. Such a presentation chimed well with an America launched upon the industrial age with hundreds of small inventors trying their luck and their fortune, resembling the scramble of the small-scale industry engineer of today’s India. Of his novels, Poor White brings out this idea best.

Hugh McVey of Poor White had a penurious childhood with no home nor education. Just when he was about to become a wastrel, a railway station came to his town and he got the job of a coolie. A sympathetic station-master imparted him education, while the station-master’s wife instilled in him a sense of purpose. Barely turned 20, he went out into the world giving up his railway job, following the vague dreams that were making him restless. For three years he wandered about many towns of the Middle West working as a farm hand in several places and observing the world around him, until he settled in Bidwell as a telegraph operator. Anderson’s details of Bidwell’s entry into the industrial age form a massive document of evocative description.

“And all over the country, in the towns, the farmhouses, and the growing cities of the new country, people stirred, and awakened. Thought and poetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in other American towns, whose fathers had walked together on moon-light nights along Turner’s Pike to talk of God, went away to technical schools.”

Hugh too catches the fever and makes a thousand plans and pours over technical tomes sorting out data. His first invention is a plant-setting machine, to transplant cabbage seedlings neatly on the field. The “embroy industrial magnate” Steve Hunter promotes this invention. Soon there is the town’s first industrial enterprise, the Bidwell Plant-setting Machine Company. Hugh turns out more inventions such as an apparatus for lifting a loaded coal-car off the railroad tracks. There is an epic quality about Anderson’s relentless descriptions of the new age. Here are breath-taking machines, people grown rich overnight and also the factory workmen populace, “mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls the mice scamper about in droves, and there is much squealing and chattering.”

Reading Poor White one feels that one is watching the India of today. Just as the simplicity, vision and trusteeship slogan of Gandhi have been laid by for industry-oriented thinking and accumulation of personal wealth for personal ends, the books of Lincoln and Garfield are not disturbed from their perch in the bookshelves. Instead, the young men began to read in the newspapers and magazines of men who by developing their faculty for getting and keeping money had become suddenly and overwhelmingly rich. Hired writers called these men great, and there was no maturity of mind in the people with which to combat the force of the statement, often repeated. Like children the people believed what they were told.”

Hugh McVey is a success story though beset with personal problems of adjustment. He marries Clara Butterworth, a rich heiress of Bidwell, and all is well. Anderson studies the growing to maturity of a rich American girl of those days while discussing Clara Butterworth. He returns to his favourite animal imagery while recording her thoughts before marrying Hugh, “an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes.”

“If I have to live with an animal; if as Kate Chanceller once said, we women have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf or a wolf-hound, she found herself thinking.”

Nevertheless Hugh McVey turns out to be a satisfactory dreamer-technician-inventor and after an initial struggle Clara and Hugh manage to make a success of their marriage. They acquire a car and the town too progresses fast. There is prosperity and also consequent human tragedies. The rich get richer, the poor become poorer! It is all so familiar to us. Life goes on and on thus. Anderson does not provide a solution to the problems of the industrial age in this novel. In his later novels written after 1925 he attempted to back up the proletarian cause. Necessarily this dampened his creative exuberance. In 1927 he bought two newspapers and settled in Virginia to edit them. Anderson passed away in 1941.

Finally, a word about Winesburg, Ohio. This book is a landmark, because it changed the character of American short stories, from mere realistic reporting to psychological exploration. Realism, whimsy, humour and compassion are mixed and compounded in the crucible of Anderson’s imagination, and presented in a prose that is as supple and liquid as verse. These “intense psychological studies of trapped and warped personalities” were a direct outcome of his nervous breakdown and hospitalisation in 1912. George Willard in this collection could be Anderson himself. A part of him is reflected in Enoch Robinson too. After all Anderson was an expert in tilling the field of memory. As Horace Gregory points out:

“His sources were the air he breathed, childhood memories of talk, of the few books loaned to him by schoolmasters, by older men in small Middle Western towns who took a fancy to the brilliant, sensitive, imaginative son of a Southern drifter and tall-tale-teller.”

Out of these sources was spread a rich feast indeed–seven novels, six collections of essays and numerous short stories. Even today Anderson is one of the few writers of the past who continue to be read avidly. He makes us pause and think; but he also gives us pure pleasure which is the real tribute to a story-teller’s genius.

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