Critical Woodcuts/Sherwood Anderson's Tales of the New Life
WELL, here is Sherwood Anderson again with another disquieting tale, "Dark Laughter."
He is a man rather difficult to make out or to "size up," externally or internally, and one shouldn't go at it too hastily. Your eyes take an impression of him distinct enough: middle height, middle age, a compact, square-shouldered person in rough tweeds, dark blue flannel shirt, and bright-colored tie drawn through a ring or fastened, perhaps, with a horseshoe pin. He stands squarely on his feet, no shifting or teetering. His well-molded head, strong-featured, firm-mouthed, substantial in all its dimensions, sits squarely on his shoulders. In speaking—his speech is mild and slow—his eyes light up quickly with humor; but in silence they are somber with a shadowy introversion. In repose the lines of the face set austerely. I fancy the head would have appealed to the sculptors who limned the tougher-minded of the Cæsars. But this visual impression is inadequate. His secret aspiration, I believe, is to be "preeminent in being more sensitive to everything going on about him than others could possibly be."
He is from the fat Midlands—born, he rather thinks, in Camden, Ohio, in 1877, of a shrewd hardworking mother and a father who was a romantic braggart and a liar. In his youth he haunted racetracks and conceived a passion for thoroughbred horses. Then he knocked around a bit on farms, in mines, in factories, in paint shops, drug stores and harness shops, working at one thing and another. But he is distinctly from Chicago, too, from the Chicago of Mr. Darrow and Mr. Masters and Mr. Sandburg and Margaret Anderson, from roaring, odorous, fuliginous Chicago, where poets are obliged to yell if they are to be heard above the booming of big business, the bellowing of the stockyards, and the bass drums of advertising conventions. Also he is from New York, where intellectual Villagers draw a little away from Wall Street to discuss anarchy and perfect love over synthetic gin and spaghetti. But finally he is from the left bank of the Seine, where one can sit all day on the boulevard talking of line and color and the virtues of words, with enthusiastic foreigners of American birth who regard George Moore, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein as the brightest constellation in heaven. Yes, he is from the fat Midlands, but decidedly he has been a passionate pilgrim.
I wish to write an introduction to the works of Mr. Anderson for the benefit of correspondents who inquire: "When will the country begin to sicken of this flood of literary rot from the corn and hog belt?" But the devil—to borrow his own favorite literary expletive, he doesn't make it easy for me!
Recently he has been down the Mississippi Valley, down the river, living in New Orleans, I believe. He has been getting the "feel" of all that rich, crude, rough, profane tract of land and water which Huckleberry Finn traversed and navigated in his ingenuous youth. He has been down in the heart of our
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transplanted Africa, and the spell of dark blood, the careless gusto of dark laughter, the magic of spontaneous and instinctive people, have been invading him. Mark Twain had told what the great river meant to a boy. What if he, Sherwood Anderson, should tell what it means to a man? What if he should attempt to suggest in same fashion how the national culture, the national letters, might be vitalized, vivified, if the national imagination assimilated its materials? It is obvious that some such undercurrent of thought was running in his mind when "Dark Laughter" took shape. His imagination has been roving southward for warmth, color, abandon.
But, as I have already remarked, "the devil!" He might have found a better symbol for the expedition, mightn't he? Here is Mr. Anderson reciting me another story about a man who has run away from his wife! I think he overworks that symbol.
This time it is a journalist with literary aspirations and a wife who writes for the popular magazines. At times they have in some "arty" people who talk about art. But they never touch the heart of the matter, with their palaver about "word-slinging." The beginning of art is to know what people think and feel. The time comes when he can stand it no longer. He runs away. He wanders around in the South; finds work painting wheels in an automobile wheel factory; consorts with a jocund fellow workman and his wife who are very jolly and lively and spontaneous when they are on their cat-fishing expeditions and are a little drunk, the two of them. Then the eye of his employer's wife falls upon him—etc. In fact, they flash together as abruptly as the electricity of earth and sky.
The first chapter of this book, which is just four pages long, seems to me as consummate a piece of art as the first chapter of "Pride and Prejudice," which also occupies four pages; and the rest of the book is keyed up to that pitch. I am not comparing Sherwood Anderson's narrative soliloquy with Jane Austen's dramatic method. I am comparing merely and exclusively the skill with which two fine craftsmen handle their tools, the ravishing economy of their means, the intensity and poignant reality of their effect. But when I have said a good word for fine workmanship, and have invited curious and shocked readers to take down their "Pride and Prejudice" and compare its first chapter with the first chapter of "Dark Laughter," what else shall I say to commend the suspicious material and theme of the Midwesterner's tale to the favorable attention of correspondents who are sick of "literary rot from the corn and hog belt"?
Shall I fall back upon the earlier novels? The first, "Windy McPherson's Son," 1916, is another tale of a runaway. Nothing enchants Mr. Anderson like a runaway. Windy McPherson is a self-made Midwestern business man whose successful career breaks down in the middle; he decamps and goes vagabonding and carousing through various sordid adventures in search of a meaning for a life that rang hollow, seemed empty. He finds his meaning in some adopted children.
In "Marching Men," 1917, Beaut McGregor runs away from his success in law to find a life-purpose in drilling men to march; he knows not why they should march or whither, but in the form and order and rhythm of marching there is something which to his chaos-maddened soul is profoundly right.
Hugh McVey, the inventor in "Poor White," 1920, runs away from his bride, leaps from the window to avoid her embrace.
Webster, the tub manufacturer in "Many Marriages," 1923, runs away from his wife and his business—elopes in the dusk of the morning with his stenographer; and when this novel appeared Mr. Canby made something of a sensation by comparing Webster's flight with the departure of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress" from the City of Destruction.
The shorter tales, "Winesburg, Ohio," 1919; "The Triumph of the Egg," 1921, and "Horses and Men," 1923, are filled with restless fugitives. Images of escape hitherto have been the dominating shapes in Mr. Anderson's imagination, and for reasons some of which are now obvious.
The central fact in his life, when you come to understand it, is this: Till he was nearly forty years old he was engrossed in the all-American game of getting on in the world. He was in the "advertising game"—making it go, too, one understands—why not? with that Cæsarian chin, that rudder-like nose, those devouring eyes. But midway in this mortal life he walked out of business into art. Midway in life he had the sort of experience which makes the crisis in many of Tolstoy's novels—a kind of uprushing profound despair over the oppressive emptiness of his busy, successful existence, a kind of desperate need of finding some soul-satisfying meaning in the clangorous scheme of things. He had the Dantean experience of losing his way in an "obscure wood" and meeting a "lion" which drove him from his path, drove him in scornful flight from the familiar path. And now, not to enter into detail which may be found most captivatingly set forth in "A Story Teller's Story," after only ten years in letters he finds himself in the front line of the "new literary movement" in America and, in certain respects of his craft, one of the most interesting men writing English. For him, at least, what happened within him at forty was epoch-making. Relatively speaking, nothing that happened before mattered till the "illumination" of his middle years broke over it.
I should like to see Sherwood Anderson "whole" and in relation to this literary movement in which he is now active. Rigorous teachers seized my youth and taught me some phrases about the desirability of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole. But experience has taught me that it is exceedingly difficult to see steadily and whole any object which is alive and moving rapidly. Our object is very much alive and is moving rapidly. I mean by our object that group of American writers which is most conspicuously engaged in the "advance of letters."
Some of them affectionately salute. Theodore Dreiser as their shaggy spiritual Father, as the path-breaker who went before them and with heavy stumbling tread opened the way to Truth and Life. Some trace their descent from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Some neither know nor inquire who their spiritual Grandfather was. But all of them, with increasing clearness as to what they are about, are seeking, in divers ways, to end the dwindling reign of "the New Englanders" over the American conscience and the American imagination. They seek to pull out all the unused stops in the organ of national consciousness. They seek to use powers that have been denied, starved, suppressed. They seek to make the voice of contemporary letters adequately express the color and passion of contemporary life. Perhaps I should add that with the general purpose of the movement, as here stated, I am heart and soul in sympathy, however impatiently I may have contemplated some of its bungling preliminary operations.
To this movement Sherwood Anderson brings a number of gifts, some of which were not abundant in it before his arrival, gifts which should be of inestimable service to it. I don't really know where to begin enumerating them nor which of them to single out as his prime distinction. But I rather think it is an allotropic form of the religious spirit which particularly appeals to me in him. It is something inward, close to his heart, regulating his other powers, and giving edge and intensity to his perceptions.
Externalized, this central passion signally flames forth in his white-hot zeal for craftsmanship. This Midwestern ex-advertising man with the inscrutable poker-player's face is down on his knees, is in sackcloth and ashes, is shattered and in tears when he finds himself in the presence of superbly perfect workmanship. The man is in love, desperately in love, with perfection. And that passion puts humility into his heart, and grace, and reverence, and the fragrance of adoration. That is one gift.
Another is that he possesses the idiom of American colloquial speech beyond most living writers—Ring Lardner perhaps excepted; and he has had the tact and the taste and the patience to work with the colloquial idiom and the colloquial tune till he has lifted them above the level of slang and made of them a sound literary medium, original and savory. In his first two books, "Windy McPherson's Son" and "Marching Men," it is present but not fully developed; in the rest of them he is master of a singularly intimate and vital style, a delicate instrument for telling the truth about the agitations of the heart in the presence of much unvisited beauty.
Another gift is that he is a natural born story teller, who has scornfully rejected standardized tricks and formulas and has steadily perfected and subtilized his art, and devoted it to expressing secret crises in the mind and in the feelings which only a delicate and subtle art can explore. I seem to remember that he was credited with being a follower of "the Russians" before he had made the acquaintance of them. If so, it was a natural error. Notably in his short stories one has the sense that one is envisaging restless naked souls in the moments which contain, as the Russian masters of the short story think, all the real significance of lives, dead else.
Another of his gifts is that he is tremendously American and is glad of it. He is no booster or braggart, save in the purely poetic Whitmanian sense. Like Whitman, he is too profoundly conscious of all that is vile and shoddy and vicious and sodden and ugly in the American scene. But in his moments of elation he, too, feels that, with all his imperfections on his head, and with all the roily turbulence within, he is "the typical American" of our day. I love his cry of defiance as a Chicago poet, in his "Midwestern Chants." Leave us alone, is the burden of it: "We want to see if we are any good out here, we Americans from all over hell." The men and manners and soil, yes, even the profanity, of his native land are a gay riot in his blood and a sweetness under the tongue as they were to Mark Twain when he first came out of the West.
Another of Sherwood Anderson's gifts.—Now, I must apologize, I suppose, for calling this a gift. He possesses what some of the younger critics devoutly hoped had gone out: he possesses "high seriousness." He has made no secret of it. From his first book to his latest he has appeared as a passionate seeker for the meaning and purpose, the inmost meaning and purpose, in this driving, noisy, smoky, ugly, hungry, monotonous, wearying civilization in which we welter.
Finally, Sherwood Anderson is or has been a mystic—I think a genuine mystic; and time after time he has been in moments of almost ecstatic "awareness," when through the arid channel of existence meaning swept like a spring freshet and all the dusty cobwebbed windows of the house of life were filled with colored flame, like a sordid tenement transfigured by some casual felicity of the sunset.
I know perfectly well that I cannot expect modern readers to follow me when I say that my interest in this ex-advertising man from Chicago and my understanding of him are due in considerable measure to my youthful addiction to a queer book by a mediæval Italian—a fierce, quarrelsome, disreputable, probably sensual and certainly vagabond fellow who wrote a book about the Beatific Vision and another, Vita Nuova, in which he describes, among other visions, this:
Methought I saw in my chamber a cloud of the color of fire, within which I discerned a Lord of aspect fearful to whoso should look upon him; and he seemed to me so joyful within himself that a marvelous thing it was; and in his words he spoke many things which I understood not save a few, among which I understood these: Ego Dominus tuus. In his arms meseemed to see a person sleeping, naked, save that she seemed to be wrapped lightly in a blood-red cloth. . . . In one of his hands it seemed to me that he held a thing which was all on fire; and it seemed to me that he said these words to me: Vide cor tuum. And when he had remained a while, it seemed to me that he awoke her that slept; and he so far prevailed upon her with his craft as to make her eat that thing which was burning in his hand; and she ate it as one in fear.
God knows what our psychoanalysts would make of this naked lady eating a man's heart; but it was once generally understood to express something of the fiery ecstasy in which this Italian vagabond entered upon a new spiritual life; and I wish modern readers who are under the spell of psychoanalytic quacks might have it in mind when they attempt to classify the day dreams of Sherwood Anderson. As for myself, for the moment I will say only that time after time he has caught and reported fragments of spiritual meaning beneath our struggle—more or less stolidly, more or less handsomely, refined and concealed—our struggle for existence.
Many of Mr. Anderson's associates in the movement have intimated—some of them have vehemently affirmed—that life has no inner meaning and purpose. And I myself have long been inclined to believe, with Conrad, for example, that life's meaning is only in the figure or pattern which human volition marks and holds in place upon the surface of infinite chaos and darkness. Perhaps I have been too rarely a mystic, too arrogantly rationalist. For Sherwood Anderson, at any rate, the meaning of life is something that the rational mind can hardly lay hold upon. Only in the "moments" which are, he thinks, the prime subjects of the story teller's art, the meaning comes clamoring through the senses, through all the senses, out of the unfathomable inwardness of life.
Symbolism just now is very much the mode in the movement, but Sherwood Anderson has always been a symbolist, feeling from the outset the necessity of storming sluggish sensibilities with a new set of images, strange, extravagant and grotesque, symbols of an experience otherwise intransmissible.
I insist on this because it is absurd to approach such a book as "Dark Laughter" or, indeed, any of his books, as if they were ordinary "realistic" novels attempting to picture the detail and circumstance of contemporary society. His books are stories of house-fronts falling down; stories of men walking out of houses and closing the doors behind them; stories of men walking up railroad tracks into the night; stories of women racing through corn-rows; stories of souls fleeing out of nowhere into nothing; stories of barren breasts opened to the night; stories of arms outstretched to enfold the fugitive wind; stories of persons bathing, with a passionate eagerness to be washed and made clean, with tears and with prayers, with water and with blood, for some mystical union with the spirit of life.
Since the day when he himself decided that he cared nothing about making money, and he went out of the factory and closed the door and entered a new room, and wrote at the top of a fresh ream of paper, Incipit Vita Nova—Here beginneth a new life—he has been, I fancy, serenely indifferent to the instituted forms of society. He has not railed at society, with the satirists. He has been all absorbed in studying more perfect means for expressing the strange joy in the hearts of men and women when, at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty and upward, they suddenly resolve not to accept the world's price for tame acquiescence in its routine, not to "fall for" a standardized antemortem burial in respectability, but to strike out resolutely for a personal life and a deeper awareness of their own existence and its brief ripple in the coursing stream of humanity.
We should approach Mr. Anderson as the impassioned interpreter of day-dreams, the day-dreams of common people—newsboys, stableboys, washerwomen, farmhands, sign painters, drug clerks, old maids, small-town preachers, tub manufacturers, newspaper men, and women with nothing to do but to wait for their husbands to come home—the great masses of the plain people, in their occasional hours of revolt against what Stevenson declared is the destiny of most men: "leading lives of quiet despair." He has an intimate and quite extraordinary understanding of what goes on in American plain people when they are groping for an escape from "lives of quiet despair." Do you wish he would keep that understanding to himself or, at least, find some less disquieting way of uttering it? You don't like his symbols?
I suppose Mr. Anderson knows how a late-Victorian poet expressed his revolt against the enveloping grayness of drab lives, "faces of all emotion purged, from nothing into nothing urged." He imagined a mad king proclaiming: "I heard an angel crying from the sun for glory, for more glory on the earth." That Sherwood. Anderson's Tales of the New Life injured no one's sensibilities. It is in the grand style, I suppose. But Sherwood Anderson knows that stable boys, farmhands, and washerwomen, so far as they attempt to phrase a kindred urge, do not phrase it in that way. Their speech in this field is poor and meager. It is of the very essence of their misery that they cannot give it a name. They can only say, per haps: "Oh, I feel so queer—so queer!" or "Hell, but I'd like a drink!" or "I want a woman." And if they act upon these urges they are likely to act in a way which only a man who understands very primitive signs and symbols could interpret as a cry for "glory, more glory, on the earth."
And yet I am sorry for any one who doesn't get the "glory" in a bit of the vernacular, like this:
Often he would go on talking for an hour maybe, speaking of horses' bodies and of their minds and wi as though they were human beings. "Lord help us, Herman," he would say, grabbing hold of my arm, "don't it get you up in the throat? I say, now, when a good one like that Lumpy Joe I'm swiping, flattens himself at the head of the stretch and he's coming, and you know he's coming, and you know his heart's sound, and he's game, and you know he isn't going to let himself get licked—don't it get you, Herman; don't it get you like the old Harry?"
It does me!
Well, there is what I have found of chief interest in Sherwood Anderson, and the only way to determine whether all these qualities are really in him or whether I have imagined them, is to read his books.