692
PARTISAN REVIEW
With certain other authors an undeviating, purely literary selection
would produce not only the most interesting but the truest portrait of
the man: Ezra Pound's life seems to have been, almost literally, an
open
book.
Yet, even if one were to admit the validity of excluding all letters
written before Anderson became an author, it seems a bit lofty to omit
nearly everything that happened to him during the period of authorship.
During these years Anderson divorced three wives and married a fourth;
a much-married man without love letters gives us a jolt. There
is
no
letter to Anderson's daughter, only two to his son Bob, who worked with
him on the newspaper enterprise; a few more to his son, John, get under
the wire because John too is an "artist," a painter, and letters relating
to that calling are summoned. This selection makes Anderson seem dis–
tinctly hard and unreal; wives are divorced in a footnote or abandoned
like unpromising manuscripts, grown children when addressed at all are
usually given a lecture on art-and the author himself is as naked as
can be, stripped to a man who is writing another book. Anderson's
strange, restless soul, remarkable beyond all else for painful, shrinking
feelings, is uneasy with his literary friends, Waldo Frank, Van Wyck
Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld. Struggling to tell them what he is all about he
is sometimes like a tenor with the stage all to himself: "I have been to
Nebraska, where the big engines are tearing the hills to pieces; over
the low hills runs the promise of com. You wait, dear Brother! I shall
bring God home to the sweaty men in the com rows." Or again he is
not so much complex as hidden and diffuse, singing in a voice not
always recognizable from one day to the next. He is a man of the
Middle West he tells
us,
close to the people, and yet alI sorts of angels
seem to be whispering in his car, correcting his accent. In this selection
Anderson seems, like Napoleon the 3rd-A Sphinx without a riddle.
Edna Millay's letters-after reading them you hesitate to know
what you thought you knew about this poet. Can this be that sensa–
tional young woman of legend who burnt the candle, built the house
on sand, kissed so many lips? More than once you find yourself thinking
of quite another enduring American type, Meg in
Little Women,
re–
sourceful, sensitive, devoted, bobbing her hair, not
to
be a flapper, but
to pay for Father's illness. These letters are very charming, although not
in the sense one would care much to read them if they were not by
Edna Millay, or at least by
someone,
for they haven't that sort of power
which can be enjoyed apart from a beforehand interest in the writer.
They show, for one thing, an intense, unmixed family devotion; not
