Anderson and Lewis

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1950) born in Ohio, a self-educated and sensitive man was in quest of answers to problems of human nature. He was often found channeling his sympathies for the Negroes, Laborers and Hangers on at the Lively Stables and Race Track, than with the respectable and the ambitious. From the manager of a paint factory and the advertising writer, he finally found his metier as a creative writer of short stories and novels. He was also an editor of two weekly newspapers, one a Democratic and another a Republican one. This proved his balance of judgment.

As a short story writer, he had an objective and a desire to beneath the surface of every-day life in America for which he had an uncanny eye. His vision had grown from the Ohio country with its small towns just below the Lake Eire, with excursions to Chicago and New York, to a well enlarged vista.

It was a commonplace criticism leveled against that subconscious levels of the men and women, had been his subject of interest. It was an oversimplification of everything. But these people had thoughts and feelings which had the stamp of commonality; their violent emotional lesions would become pronouncedly known, even before the story exploded itself before the reader. They were, by any standard, quite ordinary people. It would be a matter of interest that he (Anderson) was no psycho-analyst of the scientific order. It was the spiritual presence of characters that made them important and valuable as human beings. He never attempted to adjust his individual to the society, which was dull, sterile and insensitive. Love in all its variants would become inevitable for human and harmonious living including sex. It would resist suppression by a mechanical and a materialistic society. The strength of this force would be so high that it might leave a passionate man or woman crushed or crippled. It was Anderson’s experience that something of the Middle West would be inimical to love.

“Suppose, I suggested to myself, that the giving of itself by an entire generation to mechanical things were really making all men important. There was a passion for size. Among all the men I had known, almost every man I had known had a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster automobile than his fellow. There were modern women going more and more towards man’s life and man’s attitude towards life because they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women”. (11)

It would be a heartening trend to note that Sinclair Lewis too had identical views on this subject. But Anderson’s scope and skill were a shade below that of Sinclair Lewis. In his best stories, Anderson had shown a greater concern for the wounded heart of a woman or man. The devices and traits of mechanical civilization did not catch his interest. His stories had the horse-and-buggy age of his youth. The smugness, the commercialism and the respectability, all cramping ones’ emotions would easily go down as the bed for his narratives and the industrial revolution.

His short fiction and novels would commence with a gesture, a look, or an episode, even if trivial, suggesting a tension needing an explanation.

Like the heroine Carol Kennicott of “Main Street”, the editor-hero of “Winesburg, Ohio”, would turn meditative and loquacious. The seed sentence in Anderson would become the evolved story in the end. However, Anderson’s allergy for cramping idea of a plot, would speak of his innate desire for freedom to express, making an improvisation for his theme to grow unfettered. Anderson’s situations in his short stories did not warrant a strong woman-conquering-environment. Most of Anderson’s novels were expanded short stories, mostly confessional.

“Many Marriages” (1923) fell as a bomb-shell on the audience with its sexual frankness. For Anderson, this was, perhaps, one field which held the key to success in his life. Anderson’s hero, a teacher fit for affection becoming misunderstood, had earned a name for himself, as a violator of taboos. It was everywhere a sympathetic analysis of the inner emotional life of Man, who was a victim of the Middle West. It was without a streak of satire. He was similar to Sinclair Lewis in so far as he was dealing with familiar people in a familiar way.

“Winesburg, Ohio” (1919) was a collection of sketches of life in a small town of Winesburg. Critics like Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg were fulsome in their admiration that this should come as a counter portrayal of the cheerful, well-meaning townsman, as shown by Booth Tarkington. It had created some opposition from the prudish.

His succeeding book, “Poor White” (1920) was built upon the stereotyped lives of the successful, taking them to be granted as by-products of the American code of progress. The impact of the sterile life of a small town or an impersonal unfeeling, element of city life on Man, would feature itself as very important. Every failure in life would become quite revelatory. In power of characterization and in converting a region into a society, he would be at the lower rung of the ladder, compared with the Post-World War Writers, and Lewis for our purpose. If the soul of the Middle West and its interpretation was the forte of Anderson, Lewis excelled in depicting the outward features of the Middle West.

Lee Masters failed from Kansas. He spent his youth in the small towns of Illinois. He was quite familiar with the type of community he chose to describe. The book was an extended series of verse epitaphs, standing in sharp contrast to the conventional tombstone inscriptions. The residents of the Spoon River were made to reveal the truth about themselves through these. Their lives degenerated into apathy or despair through repression and artificial standards of morality. The quiet town was enveloped in desperation under the veil of a superficial decorum. The seething lusts and hatreds of the surface were hidden. Thus, “The Spoon River Anthology” had been the single literary influence upon “Main Street”.

The vignettes of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg Ohio” (1919) were a direct outgrowth of Lee Master’s “Spoon River Anthology”. If Masters had cynically reviewed the buried life under the calm exteriors of the Spoon River Citizens, Anderson had sympathy for twisted human spirits, the victims of repression in village life. Anderson’s group of inter-related short stories of small town communities were not communities in actuality, but aggregations of frustrated individuals. In spite of their yearning and striving to communicate they remained essentially isolated from one another. The failure of the village was the failure of love to cross the barriers of inhibitions imposed by restrictive standards of conduct. The pressures of outward conformity had distorted the natural desires of the residents of Winesburg, Ohio, into grotesques. This work was an in-depth study of their hidden life.

(11) LHUS. (IV Edn) : - 72 Fiction Sums Up a Century : Sec 7 Literary History of U.S. IV Edn. MacMillan Pub Co. NY (Page 1229)