PARTISAN REVIEW
in Anderson's work is the mere act of opening the door. Nothing grand
happens: the poor white remains dumb and dormant; the dark laughter,
that elusive token of spontaneity, cannot help; and the marching men
march straight into thick fogs of rhetoric.
Anderson raised more excitement than he could settle, more than
his materials needed or could absorb.
That was why the tragedy of his
stories was that he had to finish them.
Of few other writers could it be said that their private confusions
were so thoroughly revealed in their public writings. Anderson never suc–
ceeded in establishing that separation between private and public beings
that seems so necessary for most writers and that would have been
so especially useful to him; what he was his characters revealed, and
even the little of himself that he tried to hide they betrayed. All he
knew was that he had to keep trying because, as one of his characters
in "Unlighted Lamps" said, "something within me was straining and
straining trying to tear itself loose." It was for this persistence and
courage, I think, that those who loved him continued to love and hope
long after it became clear that there was nothing more to hope for.
But it was to Anderson's great credit that in some not too hidden
pocket of his consciousness he was aware of his difficulties. There were
a great many things he did not understand, but the one thing he did
grasp, perhaps better than most of his contemporaries, was what his
role as an artist should be. That was why he so quickly turned away
from naturalism; he knew himself well enough to sense that, whatever
its uses for others, it was clearly not for
him.
From the naturalists he
absorbed his social sympathy, his curiosity about American life, and his
rejection of the "precious" in art; everything, that is, but their central
creative approach: their massive accumulation of detail, painstaking
social documentation, and historical awareness. In fact, when one ex–
amines Anderson's stories closely, one is struck by how remarkably
devoid they are of any account of external experience or of recognizable
characters. The typical Anderson story is vague in its backgrounds,
hazy in its evocation of place and thing; the typical Anderson char–
acters all so very similar: all straining, bursting into nothingness, all
lost. Dr. Reefy who rolls up pieces of paper on which are noted his
remarkable thoughts (like Anderson's remarkable thoughts, never re–
vealed); Wings Biddlebaum who does not know what to do with his
hands; Red Oliver whose final understanding is merely an extension
of his muteness; Melville Stoner whose courtliness hardly conceals his
loneliness-these thin characters project the disabilities of Anderson's
own literary personality.
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