BOOKS
SHERWOOD ANDERSON: THE UNAVAILABLE SELF
The most efficient way academicism castrates a writer is by
"placing" him. Once confined to the proper category, he may be con–
veniently shredded into harmlessness. He no longer has an immediate
effect on our lives; we have pushed him into history.
That is what has so strikingly happened to Sherwood Anderson,
whose work has recently been anthologized in a large, much too large
book by the late Paul Rosenfeld.* Few American writers have been
lodged so neatly into so many worn categories-revolt against the vil–
lage, rejection of middle-class morality, new attitudes towards sex,
primitivism in modern culture. These formulas contain, no doubt, a
residue of a once exciting and still ·relevant truth, but at the moment
it is the kind of truth that can only remove Anderson's work from us.
For those, however, who remember Anderson as more than a dim–
ming, quaintly chivalrous "figure," Rosenfeld's collection imposes an
obligation, at whatever emotional peril, to face the question we might
prefer to avoid: what direct literary values and pleasures--quite apart
from our recognition of Anderson's "place" in American letters-does
a fresh reading of his work provide? For·such a direct approach to the
body of Anderson's work it is, I think, best to recreate his problems as
a writer by examining in cross section his lifelong struggle to come to
terms with and eventually master his craft.
"Life to Anderson was chaos," remarked Paul Rosenfeld. That is
true and important, the beginning of any discussion of Anderson; but
the remark is weighted with a neat ambiguity that evades, even as it
poses, the central problem about his work, Rosenfeld seems to imply
that, while Anderson saw modern life as a social and moral chaos,
*
The Sherwood Anderson Reader,
which he edited for Houghton Mifflin.
Rosenfeld's service, it should be noted, was happier in intention than result;
by grouping· Anderson's pieces under much too formidable thematic headings
he involuntarily revealed how limited they actually are.
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