The New Criterion

Walter Rideout
Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America.
University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. I, 833 pages, $60; Vol. II, 466 pages, $60.

Published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio brought the small town to American readers in a form not seen before in our fiction. In what Edmund Wilson described as “a series of simple declarative sentences of almost primer-like baldness,” Anderson exposed the hidden struggles of ordinary people with little hope for redemption. His collection of linked stories made his name at forty-three. No other book of Anderson’s would fulfill as completely his considerable promise as a lyric, candid observer of American intimacies.

Anderson, an Ohioan, was born to small-town poverty in 1876. “I was myself a man outside the schools,” he commented, who felt that “writing, the telling of tales, had got too far away from life.” He didn’t earn a college degree, pursuing instead a tumultuous livelihood in business—among other things, he invented and marketed a “Cure for Roof Troubles,” called Roof-Fix. Anderson took up writing wholeheartedly only after bolting from his own manufacturing company and going to work as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. “Wallowing in boldness” with the would-be bohemians of the Chicago Renaissance, Anderson spoke for his cohorts when he wrote: “Anyway there we were, intellectually dominated by New England. We wanted to escape from it.” The stories of Winesburg, written in Chicago, were thus written as a rebuke.

Also written as a rebuke were many of Anderson’s later novels, essays, memoirs, reportage, prose poems, plays, and stories. He tried writing in virtually every genre, as if to prove to his naysayers that he was something more than an American primitive. As Frederick J. Hoffman has remarked, “his worst writing came as a result of his attempts to imitate the sophistication of others,” like that of James Joyce. Some of Anderson’s best fiction came later, such as “Death in the Woods,” where his unadorned prose resembles pure song. “It is poetry,” declared Rebecca West of his sentences.

A handful of his other books, such as Poor White (1920), A Story Teller’s Story (1924), and Tar: A Midwestern Childhood (1926), attracted respect. Yet Anderson never quite got out from under his reputation as a masterly but small chronicler of American discontents. As Alfred Kazin put it in 1942:

Anderson was a minor figure, as he himself knew so well; and that was his tragedy. For the significance of his whole career is that though he could catch, as no one else could, the inexpressible grandeur of those special moments in experience, he was himself caught between them … the moments never came together, and the world itself never came together for him.

Reported Malcolm Cowley in 1961, “most of Anderson’s readers deserted him during the 1930s.”

Winesburg remains well thumbed today by countless American students, and nearly any new collection of linked stories owes something to Anderson. But the subtlety of his gifts deserves renewed attention. In 1992, Certain Things Last: The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin, helped to make that point. Now, in a wholly different manner, the release of Walter Rideout’s two-volume biography does it again.

How to explain Anderson? A state of positive bafflement was his artistic preference. He shared this bent with his best characters, as well as with his worst: the fools (or not) who walked around all night, half out of their heads, in Ohio cornfields or on Chicago concrete. Barnyards and smokestacks, not Byron, were a home to these dawdling American romantic realists: they spoke in halting, rhythmically declarative sentences about their feet in mud.

To write the life of a man like that would not be every biographer’s wish, and Anderson has not been particularly well served by biographers. James Schevill, the first of them, described Anderson in his 1959 biography as a man of “glowing talents” who suffered from “demonic wanderlust” and was punished by a crass motherland with failure after failure just because he was an artist. Schevill’s sympathies, as the son of a friend of Anderson, tended to simplify his critical approach, although he acknowledged part of the problem he faced: few at that moment agreed on Anderson’s worth. The bullying of critics, from Trilling to Hemingway, continued to contradict the effusions of Anderson’s allies (Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, H. L. Mencken). Little wonder that Schevill bewailed the “cubistic portrait” of Anderson that he’d inherited. His is a skimpier book than its 360 pages.

William Sutton’s deeply researched sally on the same path, The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson, was published in 1972. As if hoping to conduct a prose experiment akin to Anderson’s own, Sutton composed bulky “mosaics” of quotations from Anderson’s writings to take the place of straightforward biographical narrative or analysis. Loaded with a hundred pages of rambling appendices, his book also stumbles too often upon the obvious: “The teller of tales,” Anderson pointed out, “lives in a world of his own.”

Walter Rideout began his research in 1959. He took his time. The field seemed to belong to him: no other full-scale account soon came along. But then, in 1987, Kim Townsend published a life of Anderson well before Rideout was finished, even, with volume one. Nineteen more years would pass before the first volume appeared, Rideout died, and volume two succeeded him last December.

The two biographies are stylistic opposites. Townsend’s can be enjoyed as a book-length essay, led firmly by a critical point of view, and summoning a surprising narrative momentum. To his advantage, Townsend airs sharp criticisms of his passionately lackadaisical, likable Ohioan, such as: “Many Marriages is a bad novel, but who else could have written a novel so bad in just the way Many Marriages is bad?” Townsend brings a charming ruthlessness to the job, as well as a true enthusiasm. He is a writer of unusual verve in the sometimes plodding world of biographers. Consider, for instance, his opening lines:

Sherwood Anderson was born in southwestern Ohio, in the town of Camden, on September 13, 1876. In his sixty-four years he would live in countless places, but none could compare with Camden. It was his favorite, and for a very simple reason: he did not remember a thing about it. He was free to make of it what he would.

More biographers could strive for such trenchancy.

Rideout is one of those who should have strived more. By contrast with Townsend, he luxuriates in the biographical facts, letting them—rather than any incisively suspenseful critical perspective—shape his 1,353-page biography. Although we learn some fascinating small details, and begin to appreciate for the first time, in more than two dimensions, aspects of his life, his work, and especially his women, Rideout —unlike Townsend—cannot be called a nimble narrator. We’ll read his book for lack of a better one stocked with the same minutiae.

In fairness, for Rideout to muster a consistent approach while chronicling a total rover’s impetuous crawls by car, train, and boat over the years is no small success. Rideout also recalls and appraises the critical hubbubs surrounding Anderson, at various stages of his career, in an accurately tempestuous chorus. On the whole, Rideout does not romanticize Anderson, and that’s a relief. Still, why couldn’t a lifelong scholar of this writer find a bold new way to enter the writing—the best of it, and the worst—with critical enterprise and provocative alacrity?

Despite these inadequacies, Rideout makes a workmanlike case in a mostly workmanlike manner. He argues that Anderson has long been miscast as a member of the “revolt from the village,” during which writers sped from the provinces to places like Chicago, which helped them to become realists. (Claimed Anderson the debunker, once: “I care as much for realism, as realism, as I do for wornout underwear.”) Rideout prefers to characterize his man as a determined groper for community, not an outsider to it. Certainly that’s possible. Yet this main point is repeated, rather than developed, and can’t account for what seems most vividly redeeming about Anderson’s writing: its indescribable—and charmingly alien—strangeness. While Rideout’s rereadings of Anderson’s fiction are often helpful, especially when they disagree with other critics openly or implicitly (as with the Anderson story “Milk Bottles”), his habit of imputing poetic urges to the prose does not go far enough. He plays it safe with a writer who rarely wanted to do so.

To Anderson the real was actually imaginary, and demanded more imagining from him. He described some of his short prose pieces as “a sort of autobiography of unreality—of the life within that exists because it doesn’t exist.” Thus, his best prose sidles away from genre or category, often due to his use of a powerful governing metaphor. (For an especially accomplished example of this, consult his marvelous story “The Man Who Became a Woman.”) To one of his wives he confessed: “Prose means little to me without the quality of poetry buried in it. To tell the truth, dear, I have always been sly about this whole matter. I really want only to write poetry but do not want to be called a poet.” Since he couldn’t write poetry (his was abject), perhaps Anderson chose to write his prose as if it were poetry. This very oddity may be the reason why few critics have been able to grasp his work in total.

Winesburg, Ohio was no failure, yet much of what came after it seemed like that for Anderson, despite acclaim from the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to another Anderson, Maxwell:

Anderson is a man of practically no ideas—but he is one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today. Simple! The words on the lips of critics make me hilarious: Anderson’s style is about as simple as an engine room of dynamos.

If Anderson’s writing remains misunderstood, then his influence may lie more durably in his status as an exemplary literary ne’er-did-well-enough who aspired high, no matter how many times he missed the mark. “At my worst,” he wrote, “I am a petty writer not big enough for the task I have set myself.” About Winesburg he said, “Whatever is wrong with the people in the book is wrong with me.” Rideout offers copious evidence of Anderson’s slackness, without playing it. In volume two, especially, there’s a pile-up of the dross produced by a writing man who remained a wide-eyed boy, at least on his bad days.

As Anderson’s life neared its unforeseeable close, he tried his hand at small-town newspaper editing in rural Virginia; at big-time assignments, for Vanity Fair and others; and at labor reporting, alongside the woman who happily became his fourth and final wife. But the most telling detail in the storyteller’s later life, presented with stoic fullness by Rideout—whereas Townsend dashed through it—was perhaps Anderson’s death.

The man who declared, “If the large doesn’t grow out of the small it will never be large,” was felled by a toothpick. Bound for South America, Anderson took sick aboard a ship. The toothpick, spearing one of many olives in one of his many martinis, had been swallowed whole, and it speared Anderson’s colon. In 1941 he died of peritonitis. Where? At a Panama hospital—in Colón.