PARTISAN REVIEW
would light the lamp he could only stir
to
an occasional flicker. In
"Paper Pills" he wrote: "Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the
poet who will tell the hidden wonder story of the influence for which
the hands were but the fluttering pennants of promise." And Anderson
was right: he was a
pre-poet.
Amidst this chaos of his creative life Anderson had to cast around
for a device with which to establish some minimum of order in his work.
He found it in the undulations of his verbal rhythms which, it seemed,
would serve as the controlling beat and soothing center of his stories.
In those pieces where he was most at sea imaginatively, the rhythm is
most insistently established. Narrative disintegration is accompanied by
increasingly rigid monometer cadences, the false simplicity of which is
exaggerated by lulling assonance. When Anderson has his writing under
control, the rhythm is subterranean and bracing; so soon as the relation–
ship between meaning and medium is disturbed, the rhythmic beat rises
to the surface. In large measure it is responsible for that air of false
folksiness, of whining village mysticism that makes some of Anderson's
work distasteful.
Once the heavy rhythmic accent became an habitual means of
evading literary problems, Anderson's language disintegrated in spec–
tacular fashion. His last pieces, the Lincoln narrative and the folksy
editorials are unreadable, full of the lazy
schwiirmerei
of populist rhetoric.
In the end Anderson read as
if
he were a blend of Henry Wallace and
a small-town intellectual who subscribes to E. Haldeman-Julius pamphlets.
Ill
Intermittently Anderson wrote first-rate fiction; a very impressive
book could be culled from his twenty-four volumes. He wrote best when
he had no need to develop situations or show change and interaction–
when he caught his subject off guard.
Or when the subject matter, by
its very nature, allowed
him
to rest in it and feel secure that it would
not slip away from him. (Whole books slipped away from him.) When
he wrote about children and horses, for all his occasional sentimentality
about the former and frequent nonsense about the latter, his recollections
were imaginatively fresh. (See "Brother Death.")
Anderson sensed how short-winded he was, and while still at the
peak of his form, his lyrical bursts would light up background and fore- ·
ground as his attempts at sustained narrative could not. In his best
stories, most of them in
The Triumph of the Egg
and
Horses and Men,
there was neither character nor narrative development, but only a flash of
that one moment in human life that he supposed could reveal its entire
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