SHERWOOD ANDERSON
history. For his parables of incompleteness and incompetence he chose
the one form he could handle: the brief sketch. Often he did succeed in
suggesting the murky moods of murky characters, which left the reader
with the. conviction that Anderson, almost in violation of all the known
rules, moved one as few other American writers could.
One thing at a time;
isolate a character from social setting and
human relationships and t_h.en sustain a mood-picture of his most char–
acteristic feeling-that was when Anderson succeeded. Then he could
evoke the gray loneliness that hovered over all his pages; he could ask,
as
in
his story "Out of Nowhere into Nothing,"
"Did
loneliness drive
him to the door of insanity, and did he also run through the night
seeking some lost, some hidden and half-forgotten loveliness?" (This
was a sentence that gathered together Anderson's most characteristic
feelings and images, his most cherished words:
door, run, hidden, half–
forgotten.)
He understood little boys and the forgotten town queers
whom everyone else passed by; he could express the bewilderment before
sex that occupied both his contemporaries and his characters.
But the difficulties of this sort of improvisation could not long be
evaded. After a brief acquaintance with his work, the reader could
predict the development of an Anderson story. And
in
all of them the
egg-the elemental life force with which Anderson could never come
to terms-triumphed over man, as for him it had always triumphed.
In the long and painful effort of America's writers to find some
means by which to transform their perceptions into an imaginative struc–
ture, Anderson occupied a transitional position-one which largely
destroyed the bulk of his work but yet endowed it with a pathos for
those who came after him. Perhaps that is the source of one's deep
feeling, one's sense of warm kinship with this bumbling writer.
If
little
of his work now seems worth returning to,
if
all that remains is a few
stories, his effort moves us as a mythic event in American literary life.
Irving Howe
CANDIDATE
HENRY WALLACE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH.
By
Dwight Mac–
donald. Vanguard . $2.50.
This account, expanded from two widely read articles in
Politics,
does a job on Wallace. Dwight Macdonald has fished around in
a decade and a half of the career of the prophet of the people's century
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