So American

The only contest I can remember ever winning was a radio trivia quiz in the summer of 1970. The host of the afternoon talk show on WERE in Cleveland was Bill Randle, a polymath conversant in Thaddeus Stevens, Ethel Waters, Elvis Presley, science fiction and Marshall McLuhan, all of which he talked about extemporaneously between Bob Dylan and rockabilly records – a brilliant, literate, entertaining man who would not be permitted near a microphone today.

I don’t remember the question, but I was manager of a miniature golf course that summer, in the limbo between high school and college, and I had nothing to do but read and listen to the radio. I called in quickly because the prize Randle offered was a first edition of Dark Laughter, a novel by Sherwood Anderson. (Can you imagine a radio announcer giving away such a prize today? Even in 1970 it was peculiar.) I had discovered Anderson earlier that summer and fallen in love. That’s not hyperbole. My swoon was helpless, embarrassing and against my will. I had already read Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White; Windy McPherson’s Son; Horses and Men; The Triumph of the Egg; and the odds and ends collected in The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory. The latter included a nostalgic bit of journalism, “The American County Fair,” which I adored.

That fall, in my dorm room, I was reading Winesburg, Ohio yet again. My roommate, whose father was Slovak and whose mother was Austrian – both born in Europe – asked why I was reading Anderson again instead of studying for my classes. I don’t remember what I said but I remember how Mike replied: “You are so American!” He was right. That was the year of the incursion into Cambodia and the killings at Kent State (only 50 miles from where I lived). I hated the war and hated the prospect of getting drafted if I lost my college deferment. But I never stopped loving what was best about America – Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Eugene Debs, Charles Ives, Buster Keaton, and so on -- unlike many of my contemporaries. To that list, for a brief time, I added Anderson’s name.

I loved the rhythm of his prose, its simplicity and plain speaking. He had learned something from Gertrude Stein but also from the way people spoke in small Ohio towns late in the 19th century. In 1981, I would get a job as a reporter for the Gazette in Bellevue, Ohio, about 50 miles west of Cleveland. Five miles further west along Route 20 was Clyde, where Anderson had lived as a youth and which served as his mental template for the fictional Winesburg. But by that time, the love affair had soured. I found his prose cloying and faux naïf. His Freudianism was second-hand, and heavy-handed to boot. I had been spoiled by the elegant likes of Nabokov. Anderson was a hick from Ohio.

And he was. But he was also a fine writer, and it took an even better writer to remind me of that fact. Several years ago, I read a collection of prose by one of my favorite poets, the late Donald Justice. Oblivion included an essay, “The Prose Sublime.” I don’t have a copy (nor, sadly, do I own a single volume of Anderson’s, not even Dark Laughter) but in it, Justice, without apology, cited excerpts from Anderson’s fiction as examples of, well, sublime prose, and declared his love for Anderson’s work, as I had decades earlier.

In his review of Justice’s posthumous Collected Poems, Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Republic, “His model would no longer be Walter Scott but Sherwood Anderson, whose brevity, homeliness, and compassion Justice often emulates in his narrative poems. `If Sherwood Anderson, one of my favorite writers, seems never to have had an idea longer than thirty or so pages,’ he declared, `my own ideas come up even shorter.’

“Brevity, homeliness, and compassion”: A writer could pledge allegiance to shabbier virtues. I have since reread Wineburg, Ohio, though I was no longer able to read it so unguardedly as I had at 17 and 18. The sentimentality, especially, and the homespun bohemianism, made the going difficult sometimes, but I wished to be indulgent and forgiving. It’s a wonderful, imperfect book, and so American.

Addendum: Dave Lull has kindly provided me with a link to Donald Justice's "The Prose Sublime."