_Sherwood Anderson or When the Dreamer Awakes_
Few American authors, since Whitman, have taken literature as seriously
or have conceived it as being on so high a level of mysticism as
Sherwood Anderson. I mention Whitman advisedly in connection with
Anderson. His influence over the younger American writers is manifest.
Was he not the first to emphasize the bio-chemical element, and to find
lyrical inspiration in it? Dreiser’s hymns to the Vital Force, his
pæans to physiology, as well as his tragic sense of everyday life bear
Whitman’s imprint unmistakably. Sherwood Anderson owes him still more.
Sensualism and mysticism blend in his prose as they do in Whitman’s
poems. In the words of both of them we hear simultaneously the whispers
of heavenly death and the somber droning of the _Erdgeist_. Both of
them have given heed to what Emerson called the _demonic_. Both have
brought the soul and the body into magic and sensuous contact. The
poetry of the one and the poetic prose of the other seem to come from
an embrace in which the spiritual and the material still coalesce.
Modern as they are in many respects, the stamp of primitivism is on
them. In Anderson’s novels, man, like the cosmos in “Leaves of Grass,”
has not yet been disengaged from that amorphous clay kneaded by the
gods. He still finds himself in a nebulous state, halfway between
himself and animal.[35]
“Mid-American Chants” are authentic grafts budding from “Leaves of
Grass.”
To call Sherwood Anderson an _ex professo_ writer or an _homme de
lettres_ would be amiss. Fiction and song are only an outlet for his
spiritual longings. Writing is for him a groping toward the Unknown, a
mystic ejaculation of a mind in quest of itself. His works give us a
chance to catch the creative spirit in process of formation.
Like Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson is a product of the Middle West. He was
born in Camden, Ohio, in 1872. He also is an offspring of the prairie.
Taine has long been dead and his theory of _la race, le milieu, le
moment_ is to-day as dead as he. And yet, there is a great temptation
to revive it to help us link Anderson’s primitivism to his environment.
In fact, Anderson saved us that trouble recently when he published
“Tar,” an autobiography redolent with the smack of the crude land where
corn, cattle and people grow together, in torrid atmosphere, over the
huge plains swept by torrents of heat and light. The boy in “Tar” was
not made out of the common clay, but of the tepid dark loam on the
shores of the giant Mississippi. Only amidst the Russian steppes, or in
the valleys of the Ganges, could we find to-day as crude and primitive
a setting for a writer. In this respect “Tar” strikes an almost savage
note. One would wonder how such wild phases of life could appear in a
modern country like the United States, if one ignored the fact that
geography has not kept pace with history in the growth of America. The
land is still, in many parts, as crude as it was in the days of the
Indian. The primitivism of Anderson and Whitman is still written in
the expanse of their country, a country as large and as wild to-day,
here and there, as the African jungle. The real wonder is not the
resemblance between the American people and their surroundings, but the
fact that art of any sort can grow in such primitive parts.
The autobiographical element plays a large rôle in Sherwood Anderson’s
books. If there is anybody who seems to have taken upon himself the
task to prove and justify the theories of the psychoanalysts, it is
certainly he. Day-dreaming, double personality, the comedies which the
individual plays to himself,[36] the defense and enrichment of one’s
“personality picture,”--all those are the essential themes of his
novels. Anderson is the Freudian novelist _par excellence_. Personally,
he is an uprooted man with a complex heredity. He betrayed some of it
in Windy McPherson, an assumed portrait of his own father (in “Windy
McPherson’s Son”). Windy is a Don Quixote with a mania for disguising
himself. He cannot write novels but he lives and enacts them. It is
difficult to say, in his case, where reality ends and fiction begins.
A veteran of the Civil War, Windy McPherson’s imagination has become
hypertrophied. He has been shell-shocked and the trauma has left him
more than half crazy. Windy is a village Tartarin, a drunkard, a loafer
and a megalomaniac. Here is an example of his tragi-comical exploits.
One day, his small town has organized a commemorative pageant. A
trumpeter is in demand. Windy McPherson does not hesitate to offer
himself. For a long time he had been leading fictitious assaults in the
imaginative narrations of his prowess. The Bovaryism in his case is in
an acute stage. The thought of parading through Main Street astride a
fine horse, blowing a bugle before the whole assembly, fills him with
pride. Then the great day arrives. A procession is being formed. All
are waiting for the signal to start. Windy McPherson is there on his
charger as trumpeter. All of a sudden the most lamentable wheeze issues
forth from the cavalry trumpet which he wields. How far the ideal from
the reality! Windy’s son will never forget the pitiful venture, nor how
he blushed before his assembled countrymen.
There is but little filial respect left in Anderson’s tales.[37] One
of the most tragic episodes in his novels is the one in the same book
where Sam’s mother is about to die of ill treatment and misery. Windy
has come home drunk, as usual. He is crouching over a table, fussing
and mumbling. Suddenly Sam gets up. He marches toward his father, takes
him by the collar and throws him out of the room. The scuffle was harsh
and the boy rushes out for help, thinking that he may have killed
his father. Unfortunately for all concerned, such was not the case.
When Sam returns with the neighbors, still trembling lest he may have
strangled his father, he finds Windy comfortably settled in a saloon.
He could no more die of a blow than of shame, nor could he make a good
tragic hero.
On his mother’s side there is some Latin blood in Sherwood Anderson.
He has retained a touching memory of his mother, a native of Italy,
dark-complexioned, imaginative, fiery and herself the daughter of a
spirited woman. Despite his nostalgia for the Italian Renaissance and
his admiration for some of the sixteenth-century supermen, Anderson
shows very little Latinity as a thinker and an artist. He is far too
nebulous for that and refutes Boileau’s aphorism that what is clearly
conceived must needs be clearly expressed.
At the age of twelve or thirteen, young Anderson launched himself
upon the discovery of the world. For many years he had to earn his
bread by the sweat of his brow as a mechanic apprentice, a factory
hand and stable boy; he tramped among “men and horses” without much
discrimination between them. We find him in Chicago, at the age of
seventeen, without a cent in his pocket. The great metropolis of the
Middle West was to be his headquarters until he reached literary fame.
He used it for the background of the stories collected under the title
“Winesburg, Ohio.”
The modest workman of the Chicago docks and yards had a higher ambition
than merely a material livelihood. We recognize him and his dreams in
these sons of proletarians who, in his first novels, suddenly rise
by the strength of their fists to the highest positions and marry
millionaire heiresses, in order to renounce their good fortune suddenly
and go in quest of what they call Truth. This is the theme of his first
two books, “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Marching Men.” The heroes of
these books are young and ambitious, without any faith or any law, but
not without any ideals. We see in them Anderson himself, incapable of
distinguishing fact from fiction, dream from daily existence, and with
a pathetic longing toward the Unknown.
In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the American
army mobilized against Spain. He was careful himself to strip this
decision of all heroics and to insist upon passing on to posterity
for what he precisely was, a well-meaning “chocolate soldier.” Small,
stout, near-sighted and still more absent-minded, Sherwood Anderson is
modest enough to confess that he never seriously thought of conquering
Cuba or enlisting in the Rough Riders. He was satisfied with regaining
his health in the open air of the camps and in enjoying the big parade
of the marching troops, an enjoyment which he would have shared with
Walt Whitman and which has probably inspired in him both the idea and
the title of “Marching Men.”
* * * * *
Anderson came to literary composition slowly, or perhaps we should
believe him when he says that he was never out of it. The boy Giotto
began to paint while he was still a boy tending his sheep. Sherwood
Anderson never ceased to dream and to write his dreams, and he began
to do so very early. He had dreamt (and imagined things) for a long
while. That, he tells us, was always for him the real, the only way to
live. Before writing his books he had enacted, all alone, magnificent
and tragic novels in a barn, the favorite “hang-out” of his childhood
days. Sprawling among the warm hay, how many times had he given way to
dreaming! Listen to the dreamer:
To the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from
the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections
and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two
ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.
To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to
give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.
There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moved with an
ordered purpose through ordered days, or at least through ordered
hours. In the life of fancy there is no such thing as good or bad.
There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia
do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the
fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the
dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some
definite plan conceived within the human brain, die of a disease
of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to
spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines,
helping humanity--the best they can--in its no doubt laudable
ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred
miles an hour.
In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow
movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the
beautiful. What is alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of
the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned
with weariness? In the end it must become one thing or the other.
All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is
beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic
sadness and suffering.
Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere
smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of
life, one sure of himself--and thus one may remain to the end,
blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our
intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel.
In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is
ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty![38]
The whole Anderson shows himself in these remarks. With what glee he
lived in dreamland! Was not he himself that shy and frightened youth
whom he describes as stalking through the streets of his native village
with his eyes downcast as if he lived in another world? In a world
deliberately made ugly by utilitarianism, among people who think of
nothing but of getting rich quick, Anderson cast his lot with the
proletarians. The only beings for whom he shows any tender feelings are
the small craftsmen--now a vanishing caste--who used to be possessed
with a sensuous passion for fine surfaces and beautiful materials.
Without this craving for work beautifully done he sees no possible
civilization. Alas! the sense of beauty is gone. Comfort and speed have
replaced refinement and art:
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap
chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom
floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, the
jazz, the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in
the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed.
Something vibrant in the air about us all.
How is it possible to preserve a sense of the beautiful in a world such
as this? We might still find a new interest in life by learning how to
feel the beautiful finish of a perfect surface, a sensation which used
to bring an æsthetic emotion to the tip of the craftsman’s fingers.
Why not heed John Ruskin’s and William Morris’ advice and, through
the superficial amusements of our modern civilization, revive for the
arts and crafts a passion, since they have been the foundation of
civilization?
To love, to feel, to dream! That is the question. How joyfully Anderson
surrenders himself to fancy!
And what a world that fanciful one--how grotesque, how strange, how
teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that
world?...
There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell
you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the
land, let you wander there with me. There are people there with
whom I should like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied
by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day,[39]
the stout man with the gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who
stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage,
the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small
frame house by a dusty road far out, in the country.
Such was the world to which his imagination gave life, a fictitious
world, of course, but in which art, allied to sympathetic intuition is
rendered beautiful enough to make one wish that it were real. _Kennst
du das Land...?_ And how can we call a writer with this trend of mind a
realist? For him only that is real which has been first imagined.
In his attic the future author of “Dark Laughter” does not only evoke
familiar faces. He opens up wide the gates of fantasy. Soon the walls
of the barn vanish and a pageant passes before his eyes:
A narrow beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish
gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate
shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the
face of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather
than wood, marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am
perhaps dead in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not
be wonderful if I had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre,
say on the summit of a high hill above a city in which live many
beautiful men and women? It is a grand notion and I entertain it
for a time. What have I done to be buried so splendidly? Well,
never mind that. I have always been one who wanted a great deal
of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go
to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried magnificently in
a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill, near the
top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great pomp.
Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their
heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside
of my burial place. It must be through the opening the yellow light
comes. The young men who come up the hillside are wishing they
could be like me, and the young and beautiful women are all wishing
I were still alive and that I might be their lover.
And lo! the dream extended. What had this king of yore done to deserve
so much honor? Had he come to the rescue of a beleaguered city? Had he
slain the dragon of Saint George, rid the country of monstrous snakes,
or found the millennium? Imagination soared afield and the little barn,
in the small Middle West town, was magically transfigured. Let the
dreamer take us along in his flight with him. We are now in Chartres
with the Virgin so dear to the heart of sceptical Henry Adams. But this
must be an illusion. He who dreams is an American and there are no
cathedrals in his land. There are no ancient monuments there except the
walls of some Grand Canyon or the towers erected by American finance on
the promontories of Manhattan:
I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in
a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city....
It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do
not believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in
themselves. There is no need of gods now, but if the need arises
Americans will manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They
will label them “Keep Smiling” or “Safety First,” and go on their
way, and as for the woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our
race. Her purpose is not our purpose. Away with her!
Whereupon the dreamer awoke. We know now Sherwood Anderson’s _faculté
maitresse_, imagination, and the familiar form which it takes in his
books, _i.e._, evocation through dreams. His characters are so deeply
absorbed in dreaming that the author himself never quite succeeds in
waking them from their hypnotic trance.
* * * * *
If we are to believe the confessions of his autobiography, Anderson
was led to become a writer by a tyrannical impulse. He felt a physical
craving for dotting the white surface of a sheet of paper with ink or
pencil. Like that friend of his who was so fond of cigars that he took
a trunkful of them to Havana, he pleads guilty to not being able to go
to a distant city without taking his stationery along with him. The
sight of a ream of white paper thrills him to the tips of his fingers.
It calls for something to be put on it. The average man crosses the
street and sees houses and people, a child at a window, a woman with a
babe in her arms, a drowsy workman passing by. He wonders what is the
matter with these people. Lo! the white page is there and the writer
will photograph the whole thing for him. “You don’t know, but _I_
know!” exclaims the writer. “Just wait a minute and I shall tell you.
I have felt it. Now I no longer exist by myself. I only live in these
other people.” Then he rushes to his rooms; he lights the lamp and
behold! the pageant passes. Words are to the writer what colors are to
the artist. They each have a color and a taste. They are tangible.[40]
It seems to him that words are something that even his fingers can
touch “as one touches the cheeks of a child.” Here are the white sheets
of paper taunting the author to write. But like a true lover he wants
to postpone his pleasure. He must wait a day or two to take up the
challenge daringly, baldly. His worship of the white sheet is such
that he excuses the manufacturers of writing paper from his general
excommunication of capitalists. Not only does he grant them economic
privileges, but he goes as far as to put them among the saints on the
calendar:
Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped
upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal
dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers.
Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy, lying
brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I
issued a bill, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning
them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my
curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low
price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada,
I sainted. There was one man--I invented him--named Saint John P.
Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of
charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with
Saint Francis of Assisi.
Such was the physical side of Sherwood Anderson’s literary calling. The
son of an artisan, brought up among craftsmen, a craftsman himself,
he went in for writing as others do for book-binding, engraving, or
gilding, out of sheer love for the beautiful materials to be handled
and whose lure he could not resist. He confesses to being unable to
remember a period in his life when he did not have a hankering for
scrawling something in black and white. When he was in business, buying
and selling did not interest him as such. He spent his days in writing
“ads” which were profitable to his patrons. But as soon as he was at
home, the magic spell of the white sheets returned and he could not
resist any longer.[41]
Fiction seems to be nearer to fact in the United States than anywhere
else in the world. America is the land of possibilities. The life of
Sherwood Anderson, self-made man, laborer, tramp, novelist and poet,
reads like a true novel. It recalls to our mind Jack London’s “Martin
Eden.” Like Eden, Anderson attained literary fame by the sweat of his
brow and not without an athletic display of muscles. America has never
spoiled her writers. Murger’s “Vie de Bohême” tells of no hardships
comparable to those which a Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson
(not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman) had to go through
before they rose to fame. Thanks to this harsh apprenticeship, Anderson
himself has learned to be indifferent to comfort. He can write, he
tells us, anywhere, and at any time, in a factory room, on a tree stump
on the highway, in a railroad station, in the lobby of a hotel and be
perfectly unconscious of what is going on around him. He composed parts
of “Poor White” in a dingy saloon in Mobile, while next to him three
drunken sailors were discussing the divinity of Christ. He wrote the
story of Elsie Leander (included in “The Triumph of the Egg”) in the
station at Detroit. And that day, he tells us that of course he missed
the train.
His inborn absent-mindedness could not make him a very prosperous
business man, and yet he stuck to manufacturing paint for more than ten
years. The way in which he quit his job is characteristic of the man.
One day, he tells us, he was in his office dictating letters. Suddenly,
and quite unconsciously, instead of proceeding with his dictation, he
happened to utter automatically the following words: “And then, he went
into the river bed ..., and then he went into the river bed, and then
...” Thereupon Anderson got up. His stenographer thought him insane.
He went out never to return, except on one occasion, when he wanted to
ascertain what had become of his factory. Even that night he had no
luck, for the night watchman mistook him for a burglar and came very
near shooting him.
Let us not forget Anderson’s escape. There will be many similar flights
in his books. The unpardonable sin, according to the novelist, is
automatism, petrification on the surface, routine. He insists on an
incessant renewal of life, on change and migration as the essential
condition of moral progress. “Leave all and follow me!” says the Voice
which all his heroes obey.
* * * * *
One day Anderson found himself free at last, free to seek Truth.
His literary début dates from his arrival in Chicago in 1910. Since
the World Exposition of 1892, the metropolis of the Middle West had
become a first-rate artistic and literary center. Anderson found
friends, advisers and critics there. In contact with the young writers,
especially Theodore Dreiser, he became self-conscious as an artist. I
shall not go into detail of his works, or what he is pleased to call
his “scribblings” at this period. He found in Chicago materials for
verse and prose, and he began to write short stories and novels. “Windy
McPherson’s Son” appeared in 1916, not without some misfortunes of
its own. The critics were unfair to the book. According to the author
himself it was full of reminiscences of Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack
London and Zola. But the real Sherwood Anderson was there too. It was
invaluable as a piece of autobiography. It tells the pathetic story of
an ill-born youth who is forced to inhibit the best part of himself.
A deep and, at times, lyrical feeling for human miseries pervaded the
novel. It heralded the advent of an American Dostoievski.
The sad idyll of Sam and Mary Underwood, the gloomy atmosphere and the
semi-consciousness through which the protagonists of this book move
and seek themselves, foreshadow his novels of a later date. At the
end of the story, Sam McPherson withdraws himself from the world, he
becomes converted and makes up his mind to seek Truth and not earthly
ambitions. Sam was born of poor parents and had to rise painfully by
his own means.[42]
He tore himself away from his early environment. He got into the good
graces of a wealthy manufacturer in Chicago. Upon getting rich, he
married his employer’s daughter. The plot is developed through episodes
which would seem incredible had we not read similar ones in Upton
Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. Sam begins as a superman, _à la_ Frank
Cowperwood, which means that all the roads to success seem fair ones
to him. He is at first a conscienceless “bounder,” to use Anderson’s
own phraseology. He does not believe in the sweet and Christian ethics
of failure. Then suddenly, at the end, he drops everything to become a
socialist. Up to this point this story reads very much like a book by
Upton Sinclair. But Anderson is more of a mystic than of a socialist.
He does not much trust the proletariat helping moral progress. Sam is
converted. He redeems himself, not by following the path of social
justice but that of Love and Pity. The book is particularly interesting
from the angle of psychoanalysis. It discusses a case of the
dissociation and reunification of the self, a problem which was soon
to become an obsession with the author. The whole story is based upon
Sam McPherson’s efforts to disentangle his true “personality picture”
from his adventures. Later on Anderson refuses to help his characters
out of the depths of the subconscious. He lets them flounder in the
darkness of their conscience. But he had not reached that stage yet, at
the time of which I am now speaking. Then he did not neglect to answer
the S.O.S. of his characters in distress. Here is the portrait of Sam
McPherson as a representative American:
Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his
money, that he spent so many years and so much of his energy
acquiring, does not mean much to him. What is true of him is true
of more wealthy Americans than is commonly believed. Something has
happened to him that has happened to the others also, to how many
of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains,
men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what they had
thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary, they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have
leaned the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a
little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
“_It is only when you are torn from your mooring and drift like a
rudderless ship that I am able to come near you._”
The banner has been carried forward by a strong, daring man, filled
with determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans
have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have
called ourselves Christians but the sweet Christian philosophy
of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he
has failed, is to take life and courage away. For so long we have
to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests,
great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building
itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a
lifetime.
In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,
Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear
in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the
new land. When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of
failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl.
Sam McPherson represents the two states of the American conscience,
the Christian and the primitive. Half of his life was spent like that
of Theodore Dreiser’s realistic heroes. He succeeded practically; that
is, he failed morally and spiritually. Finally the angel in him got the
best of the beast. He found salvation in humility and renouncement,
like another Saint Francis. The mystic longings of Sherwood Anderson
have left an unmistakable imprint on this early work. He was not
content to draw his characters in unconsciousness. He counselled them,
comforted them, and acted to them as a good Samaritan.
* * * * *
“Marching Men,” an epic in three parts, is also a fine book, although
sociology and mysticism are blended in it to the point of confusion.
It reads very much like Zola’s “Germinal.” The hero of the book, Beaut
McGregor, is the son of a Pennsylvania miner, who was buried alive in
a mine. The book is full of these soberly drawn and semi-allegorical
portraits in which the author excels: the oculist, the hunchback, the
violin maker, the philosophical barber, the poor milliner. Robert Frost
alone can be a match to Anderson in this kind of telepathic sketches.
Beaut McGregor is searching for the imponderable values of life, yet he
finds drunkenness, sex and hunger as the sole incentives of most men’s
existence.
Anderson’s imagination is pessimistic. He sees the world in black and
white. He is quite veracious in saying that there is something Russian
in him. His artistic sense and his philanthropic Christian heart
connive to comprehend the most pathetic aspects of life with sympathy.
He has cast his lot with the proletarian, the poor, the desperate, the
lonely, in the sooty suburbs of the big cities or the twilight of some
village. He is pessimistic, but his pessimism is religious and moral.
Man does not live by bread alone but by whatever word issues from the
mouth of God. Anderson is a disciple of Tolstoi. The social problem, as
he conceives it, is a moral problem. Social anarchy is but a sign of
the chaos within us. We may, through true insight, arrive at the source
of our troubles:
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How
to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of
democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavors, is the riddle
of the Universe; and the thing that in the artist is called the
passion for form, and for which he also will laugh in the face of
death, is in all men. By grasping that fact, Caesar, Alexander,
Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods
that walk, and not a man of all the thousands who marched with
Sherman to the sea, but lived the rest of his life with a something
sweeter, braver and finer, sleeping in his soul than will ever be
produced by the reformer scolding of brotherhood from a soapbox.
The long march, the burning of the throat and the stinging of the
dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder against shoulder, the
quick bond of a common, unquestioned, instinctive passion that
bursts in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the
doing of the thing, be it winning battles or destroying ugliness,
the passionate massing of men for accomplishment--these are the
signs, if they ever awake in our land, by which you may know you
have come to the days of the making of men.
Anderson is not dazzled by the sumptuous façade of American prosperity.
He sees the reverse of the stage setting, the slums, the mines, the
factories, the jails and the asylums. Listen to Beaut McGregor, the
hero of “Marching Men,” as he stands on the hills above the dark
valleys where the sordid cottages of the miners are nested:
The long, black valley, with its dense shroud of smoke that rose
and fell and formed itself into fantastic shapes in the moonlight,
the poor little houses clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry
of a woman being beaten by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke
fires and the rumble of coal cars being pushed along the railroad
tracks, all of these made a grim and rather inspiring impression on
the young man’s mind, so that although he hated the mines and the
miners, he sometimes paused in his night-wanderings and stood with
his great shoulders lifted, breathing deeply, and feeling things he
had no words in him to express.
Sherwood Anderson entertains no illusions regarding our much
vaunted modern civilization. He sees the modern man in a state of
disintegration and moral collapse, due to greed and lust. The surface
gives an illusion of grandeur, but there is a bog underlying the
structure. To prove his point, the writer bids us accompany him
in a walk around Chicago. We are supposed to escort a well-meaning
American business man through the city. He is a well-balanced and
kindly person, inclined to take a rosy view of life. Let us follow
him in his walk. In front of a house a man is seen mowing the lawn.
There is something pleasant in the screech of the lawn-mower. A little
farther up the street the wanderer peeps through a window and perceives
pictures hanging on a wall. A woman in white plays the piano. How
sweet and quiet life is! The wanderer lights a cigar. Everything seems
so beautiful and fresh, and, lo! by the light of a street lamp he
sees a man staggering against the wall. Never mind! The wanderer has
enjoyed a good dinner at the hotel. He remains optimistic. Drunkards
are prodigal sons. Wine and song are incentives to work. Let us pass
on! The wanderer can have no grudge against his time and country. Let
the I.W.W. howl, if they want. All of a sudden two men come out of
a saloon and palaver on the curb. Now one of them jumps and, with a
rapid thrust forward of his whole body, knocks his friend down in the
gutter. Sinister and smoky buildings all around look like accomplices.
At the end of the street an enormous crane erects its snout against
the sky. The wanderer has thrown away his cigar. Somebody walks in
front of him and raises his fist to heaven. He notices with a start the
movement of the man’s lips, his large and ugly face in the glare of
the street lamp. But he keeps on going, and hurries among pawnshops,
saloons and what not. He has a nightmare.... He sees a burglar looking
over the walls of a garden where children are at play,--the wanderer’s
own garden and own children. It is getting late. A suspicious looking
woman comes down a stair, with bleached face. A police wagon rattles
by. A child kicks dirty newspapers along the street. His piercing
voice dominates the din of the street-cars and the siren of the police
patrol. The wanderer hastens to board a car to return to his hotel.
Life, after all, is not as rosy as he thought. His good humor has
disappeared. He is irritated at having wasted a fine evening. He is
no longer so content with his affairs, as he goes to bed with the din
of the city still in his ears. He sees the head of a red man bending
toward him in his sleep.... This is the way Sherwood Anderson tells his
apologues and dramatizes what he calls the failure of American life.
At the end of the novel Beaut McGregor has become a famous and
militant lawyer. His mother, Nance, is dead and he himself has buried
her upon the hill. The description of Nance’s funeral is truly epic
and resembles the strike in Zola’s “Germinal.” “Marching Men” ends
on a sharp turn. Beaut McGregor courted two women, one poor and the
other rich. He marries a shy, self-effacing milliner, to commemorate,
perhaps, in his own fashion, the wedding of the Saint of Assisi with
the Lady Poverty.
* * * * *
Anderson will not write such books again. The psychoanalyst will soon
win over the mystic, but we know him pretty well now, from these first
books, as a sensual and a mystic lover of Truth, as the detective of
our hidden thoughts and of double hearts, as a man enamoured chiefly
with dreams. There are several scenes in “Marching Men” characteristic
of Sherwood Anderson at his best as an artist. He belongs among the
novelists of the proletariat, nearer Dostoievski and Tolstoi than
Victor Hugo or Émile Zola, because of his mysticism. I select the
narrative of the death of Beaut McGregor’s mother, Nance, as an example
of his talent to blend the here below with the far beyond. Nance dies
of utter misery on a fine evening. She kept a little bakery. Since the
death of her husband in the mine, she lived in complete seclusion,
respected and feared by the miners:
In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she
would die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for
her. In the street two drunken men stood talking, their voices
concerned with their own human affairs coming in through the window
and making life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. “I’ve
been everywhere,” said one of the men. “I’ve been in towns and
cities I don’t even remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who
keeps a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there.”
The other man laughed. “You’ve been in Jake’s drinking too much
beer,” he jeered.
Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her
that life with all of its color, sound and meaning was running
away from her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine
rang in her ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying
asleep below the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its
mouth open to eat men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung
over the back of a chair, took the shape and outline of a face,
huge and grotesque, staring silently past her into the sky.
Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did
not think of the place to which she might go after death. She
was trying hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to
fight, not to dream dreams.
Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about,
in the old days before her marriage, of the walks she, as a
young girl, had taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons, and
of the times when they had gone together to sit on the hillside
overlooking the farming country. As in a vision, the dying woman
saw the broad fertile land spread out before her, and blamed
herself that she had not done more toward helping her man in the
fulfillment of the plans she and he had made to go there and live.
Then she thought of the night when her boy came, and of how, when
they went to bring her man from the mine, they found him apparently
dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought life and death
had visited her hand in hand in one night.
Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of
heavy feet on the stairs. “That will be Beaut coming up from the
shop,” she muttered, and fell back upon the pillow, dead.
Sherwood Anderson does not dwell on surfaces. His characters come
out of the Unconscious. They move deep into a region where words can
scarcely penetrate. As an instance of his understatements, I quote
another scene from “Marching Men.” Beaut McGregor has climbed the
hill to dream alone. He likes to go to the high places to pray. Three
women come to him. Beaut has gotten over his timidity and consents to
sit down with one of them, who is looked upon as a coquette. Here is
a suggestive bit of Andersonian dialogue with little said and much
understood:
On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into
the valley. “I wonder why we don’t go there, mother and I,” he
said. “When I see it I’m filled with the notion. I think I want to
be a farmer and work in the fields. Instead of that, mother and I
sit and plan of the city. I’m going to be a lawyer. That’s all we
talk about. Then I come up here and it seems as though this is the
place for me.”
The tall woman laughed. “I can see you coming home at night from
the fields,” she said. “It might be to that white house there with
the windmill. You would be a big man and would have dust in your
red hair and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman
with a baby in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand
leaning on the fence waiting for you. When you came up she would
put her arm around your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard
would tickle her cheek. Your mouth is so big.”
A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had
said that, and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then
and there. He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the
hill far away at the other end of the valley. “We’d better be
getting along back,” he said.
The woman remained seated on the log. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ll
tell you something--something it’s good for you to hear. You’re so
big and red you tempt a girl to bother you. First, though, you tell
me why you go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand
in the stairway in the evening.”
Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the
black-haired boy had told him of her. “Then it was true--what he
said about you?” he asked.
“No! No!” she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on
her hat. “Let’s be going.”
Beaut sat stolidly on the log. “What’s the use bothering each
other,” he said. “Let’s sit here until the sun goes down. We can
get home before dark.”
They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
boasted of his father.
“I’m too old for that boy,” she said; “I’m older than you by a good
many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about
women. I do pretty well. I don’t have anyone to talk to except
father, and he sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep
in his chair. If I let boys come and sit with me in the evening or
stand talking with me in the stairway it’s because I’m lonesome.
There isn’t a man in town I’d marry--not one.”
The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his
father were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather
than this pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly
like the women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again,
as he had thought before, that he preferred the black-faced miners,
drunk and silent, to their pale, talkative wives. On an impulse he
told her that, saying it crudely, so that it hurt.
Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side, and
again he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the
hill. Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the
town.
Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the roadside.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the
sky. “One living up here and never going down there might think it
rather grand and big,” he said. Again the hatred came. “They might
think the men who lived down there knew something instead of being
just a lot of cattle.”
A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look
stole into her eyes. “We get at one another,” she said, “we
can’t let one another alone. I wish we hadn’t quarrelled. We
might be friends if we tried. You have got something in you. You
attract women. I’ve heard others say that. Your father was that
way. Most of the women here would rather have been the wife of
Cracked McGregor, ugly as he was, than to have stayed with their
own husbands. I heard my mother say that to father when he lay
quarrelling in bed at night and I lay listening.”
The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. “I don’t
like the women,” he said, “but I liked you, seeing you standing
in the stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased.
I thought maybe you amounted to something. I don’t know why you
should be bothered by what I think. I don’t know why any woman
should be bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would
go right on doing what you want to do, like mother and me about my
being a lawyer.”
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and
watched her go down the hill.
“I’m quite a fellow to have talked to her all afternoon like that,”
he thought, and pride in his growing manhood crept over him.