lack of aesthetic arrangement has Mr Anderson created for himself so large and unmistakable a following? It is, we believe, because of a certain perturbed integrity, a thwarted infantile idealism which seeks to construct a new salvation for the human race and cries out for new definitions, new sex emancipation. Where Mr Dreiser like a giant mole with strong flat hands tore up the soil and prepared the ground for a more liberal treatment of sex in American literature, Mr Anderson, nervous and mystical, follows along like the anxious white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland clasping instead of a watch the latest edition of Sigmund Freud. Dr Canby's comparison of him to John Bunyan is not, therefore, as absurd as it might seem on the surface, for there is in Sherwood Anderson a great deal of the mid-Western evangelist, an evangelist whose bigotry has been dissipated through intelligence, and whose intelligence has remained, to quote an excellent phrase of Van Wyck Brooks', "bogged and mired in adolescence." He succeeds, however, in depicting with historical perspective the disorder and meaninglessness of the American scene, the loss of our richer heritages, even while permitting such explanations to obtrude upon the development of his characters—characters which, as Mr Edmund Wilson aptly pointed out in his review of Many Marriages are, in so many instances, more like the figures in comic strips than actual human beings.
But unfortunately for American letters it must be conceded that when all has been said Sherwood Anderson taps on occasions deeper veins than almost any other of our contemporary novelists. Whether he will achieve a greater perfection in the short story, that realm of literature in which he is most at home, depends largely upon his ability to extricate himself from the debilitating influences of other writers and to think out his problems alone. At present, we feel, he somewhat resembles a man, who, having planted a fine bed of radishes, tends them rather carelessly and sells them before their time, so that when one comes at last to buy them in the open market they turn out, unfortunately, rather softer than any good radish has a right to be. To have attained their legitimate freshness and pungency they should, one strongly suspects, have been left to reach maturity in the promising and well-manured soil of Winesburg, Ohio.
