BOOKS
341
Proust, or his own poems, or refer archly to his other works-anything
for
panache:
Cocteau's sleight-of-hand without his poetry. Like an over–
elaborate joke, the entertainment misses fire: the characters have point,
the incidents have point, the story has not. "No foundation," as the old
fellow mutters in Saroyan-"no foundation, all along the line."
FRANK ]ONES
AN AMERICAN LIFE
Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs. Harcourt Brace. $3.75.
Unlike most, perhaps all other reviewers of
Sherwood Anderson's
Memoirs,
I have to confess almost complete ignorance of the author's
fiction, poetry and plays. I have never read
Winesburg, Ohio,
or
Tar,
or
Dark Laughter,
or any of the other works which made Anderson
famous. My knowledge of him and of his talent must be based on this
one book. That is a handicap. Perhaps
it
is also an advantage.
My reason for not having read Anderson may be worth mentioning.
My interest in his writing was checked long ago by a phrase-very com–
monly echoed in England at that time: "Sherwood Anderson is the Ameri–
can D.
H.
Lawrence." It was a stupid, convenient, superficial compari–
son. The two men do not really resemble each other, except, to some
extent, in their choice of subject-matter ; but they do both owe a great debt
to Whitman, and this accounts for a similarity, not of style but of tone.
Both could be chatty, extraordinarily readable; both could create an
unforgettably vivid moment, a scene, an action, a gesture; both could
thunder forth prophetic utterances in the
Also Sprach
manner, (but here
Lawrence was much the louder and funnier of the two ) .
So, if we are to play at labels, let us say rather: Sherwood Anderson
is the American Sherwood Anderson. All writers, of course, are condi–
tioned by their national backgrounds; but Anderson, to judge from this
book, was aware of his to the point of obsession. Everything is referred
back to it, blamed on it, credited to it. Maybe only the British Isles could
have produced Lawrence, but, as one thinks of him-sitting under a tree
in Mexico and talking to a bird, or mocking the Italian fascists, or thrust–
ing his aggressive beard at the Australian moon- he does not seem spe–
cially British, or specially anything. He was nobody's child. Anderson,
one feels, took Ohio with him wherever he went- even to Paris.
In Paris, Gertrude Stein paid him one of the most wonderful compli–
ments I have ever heard: "You sometimes write what is the most important
thing of all to be able to write, passionate and innocent sentences." Read–
ing the opening chapters of this book, the childhood chapters, I think I
see what she meant. It was passages of this quality, perhaps, which made
some critics accuse Anderson of imitating Tchekhov and Turgenev.
It
would be truer to say simply that his descriptions of children and adol–
escents-like those of the great Russians, and unlike ninety-nine percent
of all other such descriptions-do not appear to be sentimentalized,
brutalized, or otherwise faked.
