[An American critic, editor, poet, translator, and historian, Cowley has made valuable contributions to contemporary letters with his editions of the works of such American authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Ernest Hemingway. In the review below, he argues that Howe was not the critic best suited to discuss Anderson's works but nonetheless finds Howe's treatment satisfactory.]

Among their other duties the four editors of the American Men of Letters Series—Joseph Wood Krutch, Margaret Marshall, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren—have to serve as marriage brokers and officiating clergymen. They find an American author whose life and work should be revaluated, they find what they hope will be an appropriate critic and they bring them together in holy wedlock. The marriage lines are a publisher's contract and the dowry is an advance against royalties. The offspring is a book and, if eugenic principles have been observed, it is usually a good one.

Recently the four editors have godfathered and mothered some excellent books. Newton Arvin's Melville, which won the National Book Award as the best recent work of criticism by any American writer. John Berryman's Stephen Crane is a reinterpretation based on new material and new insights; and I hear fine things about F. W. Dupee's Henry James, which I have still to read. My report on Irving Howe's Sherwood Anderson is not quite so favorable. The book is good in its way, because Howe tried hard to make the marriage a success; but it is one of those occasions when the editors of the series didn't bring the right couple together.

For the faults of the book neither Anderson nor Howe is responsible. Anderson did his best to be a good subject by living at a critical time, by leading an interesting life and by writing some of the finest stories in our literature. Conveniently for future biographers and critics, he managed to be neglected during the last ten years of his life, when he suffered from a sense of failure but also, at moments, did some of his best work. All the writing of his final period needs to be reread and reinterpreted. Howe was willing to undertake the task and worked at it with a keen critical mind, but he would have done a better job with Goethe or Gandhi. Anderson, the Midwesterner, is simply out of his orbit.

Howe is an Easterner and a city-dweller, not a townsman. He has a philosophic mind, thinks in terms of concepts (rather than in terms of things or feelings), uses a great many abstract words, and is not afraid to make dogmatic judgments. Anderson groped and faltered. He had a keen business intelligence when he wanted to use it—and sometimes he was using it when others thought that he was being innocent—but when writing he tried to depend entirely on his instincts. For his own time and in solving his own problems, I think he was right to do so, though it may be hard to explain just why he was right. Briefly, he was attempting to deal with states of mind that had never been presented in literature. There were no rules for what he was trying to do, and if he followed the rules that existed for other types of literature, they would have misled him into doing something conventional. On the other hand, if he followed his instincts there was a chance that he would produce something valuable and new.

All his life he worked hard at his writing, but he had little ability to plan it in advance, little ability for construction—beyond the limits of a short story—and no ability whatever to revise what he had written. If it didn't come right the first time there was only one remedy, to wait a month or a year and do it all over from the beginning. Sometimes he wrote a story once and it was as nearly perfect as he could make it. Sometimes he wrote it five or six times and it was still a failure—or perhaps it was finally a masterpiece, like "Death in the Woods," a short piece that took him nearly ten years to finish. Howe has no sympathy for that method and I doubt that he understands it. He has little feeling for the rhythm of sentences and none for the shape or color of words. He likes clear ideas, solid constructions based on European culture; essentially he doesn't like uneducated men who grope and fumble for a new sense of life. The difference between the critic and his subject becomes clear when we set any passage from one beside any passage from the other. Here, for example, is Howe talking about the industrial development of Ohio:

The central fact about Ohio life in the late 19th century is thus the temporary coexistence of sharply contrasting types of social organization. It is precisely this conjunction which has been neglected by those historians who tend to view the frontier and the recent frontier as isolated historical sectors moving autonomously to more advanced stages of economy.

The quotation isn't fair to Howe, because it comes from his first chapter and the writing gets better as he goes along. Still, it makes a curious contrast with Anderson talking about much the same subject:

Will you take the new life? Will you take the factories, the inside and outside of the factories, as you once took rivers, fields, grassy slopes of fields?

Will you take the blue lights inside of factories at night as once you took sunlight and moonlight?

Howe thinks in terms of concepts; Anderson feels in terms of tangible things. They speak different languages and belong to different nations of the mind. The wonder is not that Howe's book is sometimes lacking in sympathy and gives Anderson credit for something less than his real achievement; the wonder is that the critic often comes so close to his subject. The chapter on Winesburg, Ohio, is the most searching and the fairest discussion that the book has ever received. The chapter called "The Short Stories" is almost as good—though if Howe had remembered that some of the stories he was praising, with others of the same quality, were written during Anderson's last years, he might have talked less about his decline as a writer. In general he finds the right things to condemn and the right things to admire, though he doesn't find all of the latter; nor does he realise how much Anderson did for the next generation of novelists. He ends the book with what seems to me exactly the right sentence about Anderson. "Yet there were." Howe says, "a few moments when he spoke, as almost no one else among American writers, with the voice of love."

For that sentence one forgives his "temporary coexistences" and his "isolated historical sectors moving autonomously," and one looks forward to a book in which this young man of sharply critical mind will deal with a subject more within his circle of sympathies.