and you pay as you leave with a tiresome repetition of the same.
When a Story of the O’Brien school begins like that, you feel sure it is
going to lead to something disgusting and you are seldom disappointed,
certainly not in this instance.
It is a sort of elegy on the falling leaves.
Mr. Anderson almost weeps for pity of the falling leaves. Listen to the
patter of the Andersonian tears:
“* * * the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily. The
rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across
the sky. In October, leaves should be carried away, out over the plains,
in a wind. They should go dancing away.”
You have a feeling as you read this, that Mr. A. rather fancies it
himself. You can almost hear him say: “I do this fallen-leaf stuff rather
well, if you know what I mean!” and since it is the only pretty bit in
the Story, you hardly blame him for repeating it at the end.
For my part, I am suspicious; I am not from Missouri, but, nevertheless,
I require to be shown.
I ask myself: “Is Mr. Anderson sincere?”
I read further on, and I find that he is not.
This is what I read:
“* * * His arms tightened about the body of the little dog so that it
screamed with pain. I stepped forward and tore the arms away, and the dog
fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt it had been injured. Perhaps
ribs had been crushed. The old man stared at the dog lying at his feet.”
Nothing more about the little dog until, a few lines further on, Mr.
Anderson shows that the dying agony of a little dog excited only a
passing interest in him. “An hour ago the old man of the house in the
forest went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be
that as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion.
It may be that the dog, like the workman’s wife and her unborn child, is
now dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are
falling like rain—the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down
heavily * * *,” and so on, with a repetition of the opening rhapsody of
grief for the falling leaves.
So, you see, to Sherwood Anderson a falling leaf is a heart-rending
sight, but a falling puppy, even though its ribs be crushed and it scream
with agony, is quite another thing.
No, Mr. Anderson is not sincere.
And if an artist, though he fairly reek with seething dynamic chaos and
vitally compelling psychology, have not sincerity, all the Asterisks in
Mr. O’Brien’s sweatshop will avail him naught.
End of Project Gutenberg's Neither Here Nor There, by Oliver Herford