PARTISAN REVIEW
"There is a story.-1 cannot tell
it.-1
have no words ... I have a
wonderful story to tell, but know no way to tell it."
Anderson felt a strong urge to transcend the limits of the articulate.
Much of the sense of strain that one finds in his work stems from the
attempt to articulate what is for him inaccessible-an ambition so much
more admirable than that of most of his American contemporaries, who
were only too ready to play it safe.
These conflicting urges did not escape the notice of Anderson's
contemporaries and friends, most of whom saw the problem as involving
unique qualities, or disabilities, of his mind. That his mind was rusty,
that his writing could frequently have been improved
if
he had resorted
to the usual kinds of intelligence, is certainly true. But I think that
Anderson was trapped in a less private, larger dilemma than could
have been caused by his failures of intelligence, a dilemma characteristic
of his generation and milieu. Given his personal experience and the
limitations of the American literary tradition to which he was so closely
bound, what relationship could he establish with his craft?
That a mere resort to intelligence was not
his
solution could be
seen when, after prodding by adverse criticism, he declared that he
felt
the need to think. As he wrote in
Beyond Desire
of Red Oliver, another
of his symbolic heroes: "Red Oliver had to think. He thought he had
to think. He wanted to think-thought he wanted to think.
In youth
there is a kind of hunger."
(My emphasis-I.H.) Characteristically,
Anderson summed up Oliver's uneasy "need" for thought in an organic,
sexual image; and Oliver actualized this "need" not by thinking but by
a willful act of personal sacrifice.
Had Anderson developed a coherent personal vision or set of
aesthetic symbols his lack of organized thought might not have been
too disastrous. Lacking these, he turned to primitivism. But the split in his
creative . life, his suspension between reality and symbol, made it im–
possible for him to succeed in the primitivist mode. For the very prim–
itivism by means of which Anderson tried to depict elemental situations
and come close to the folk was in his case an extremely arty device
that really separated him from the folk; and yet it was not art-worthy
enough to serve as a sophisticated means of disengaging himself from
the folk. He could find sustenance neither in the deep kinships of the
folk bard nor in the demanding traditions of the sophisticated artist.
II
Since he was not unaware of his split literary personality, Anderson
conceived of himself as a precursor of a poet yet to come, a poet who
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