`A Ceremonial, Small Mystery'

We remain loyal to certain writers despite their obvious failings and the persuasiveness of critics who note these failings and rightly condemn them. In my case, two sorts of nostalgia account for most of these irrational fidelities – a nostalgia for the world described by such writers and for my younger self’s joy at first discovering them. My foremost example is Sherwood Anderson, a writer whose reputation, if one exists beyond a few scholars, depends on a single, very good book, Winesburg, Ohio.

In 1965, the University of Chicago Press reprinted Anderson’s first published novel, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916), with a new introduction by Wright Morris. I had been rereading Morris, but made a detour into rereading Anderson, a writer at his best in small, prudently selected units. He wrote sentences, paragraphs, occasionally chapters but never novels. In his lovely essay “The Prose Sublime,” the late poet Donald Justice admires a brief passage from another Anderson novel, Poor White, and says:

“It is no more than a broken-off piece of a whole, but a whole in this case that really cannot be said to exist, a novel which survives, if it does, only in pieces, perhaps by now only in this very piece. Anderson seems never to have had a thought longer than thirty pages or so, and in the novel this paragraph rises toward whatever life and beauty it possesses out of a context truly flat and torpid.”

This is exquisitely and honestly phrased. I agree with Justice’s verdict, and go on loving Anderson, as evidently he did. Here’s the opening paragraph of Windy McPherson’s Son:

“At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall, big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.”

There’s a smeary lack of focus in Anderson’s words. Read the opening phrase and you might expect Faulkner, but the prose is essentially pre-Modernist, lacking the hardness and precision we associate with the best of, say, Faulkner and Cather. Too many adjectives, too many adverbs, too little animating energy. It’s prose that brings out the red pencil in me. Here’s what Morris says about it:

“This picture of a thirteen-year-old barefoot boy is now closer to parody than portraiture, to Norman Rockwell than it is to life…Sam is closer to Huck Finn than Holden Caulfield. Little but the Mississippi seems to lie between Huck Finn and young Sam…When not literature, Windy McPherson’s Son is history.”

That last observation is shrewd, and probably accounts for my abiding fondness for Anderson. He was born in Camden, Ohio, in the nation’s centennial year, nine years before Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and 11 years after the Civil War. Joyce was born six years later; Pound, nine; Eliot, 12; Faulkner, 21. Anderson remains rooted in the 19th century, while Joyce and company helped fashion the 20th. Anderson, like Sam, is a barefoot boy, and this Ohio innocence lends his work a powerful pathos. Here’s Justice again, on the passage from Poor White:

“The experience has the character of a ceremonial, small mystery; and I would add that what we experience seems to involve a perception of time. It is a classic instance of things coming together even as they pass, of a moment when things may be said to associate without relating. The feeling raised by this perception is one of poignancy; perhaps that is the specific feeling this type of the prose sublime can be expected to give rise to. Made up of unspoken connections, it seems also to be about them. Probably it is not peculiarly American, but I can recall nothing in European novels, not even in the Russians, which evokes and gives body to this particular mood.”

This almost eerily describes my feelings about Anderson, which Morris seems to have shared. He dedicated his 1952 novel, The Works of Love, “to the memory of/Sherwood Anderson/pioneer in the works of love.” In an interview, Morris said he felt a kinship with Anderson and “his muted, groping characters,” and he later referred to his father as “a Sherwood Anderson tragic figure—full of the froth of American dreams but hardly any of the facts.” Morris, a Nebraska native, was an infinitely more sophisticated man and writer than Anderson, but attuned to his themes. As the epigraph to God’s Country and My People (1968), the third of his photo-texts, Morris used a passage from Beckett’s Molloy:

“From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can’t do it.”

A sensibility that can encompass both Beckett and Anderson is rare and worthy of respect. Unlikely as it seems, Morris and Anderson (and Justice, for that matter) applied their various gifts to “things about to disappear.”