[In the following essay, Chase provides an overview of Anderson's later novels, essays, and poetry.]

LATER NOVELS

Anderson has so far published five novels; in addition to the two already discussed, there are Poor White, Many Marriages, and Dark Laughter. They are not good novels; not one of them, considered as a whole, compares with his better short stories. Yet they all contain episodes that are almost short stories in themselves and that, as episodes, hold their own with anything he has written.

Each of these novels wobbles annoyingly toward the end; in each one the hero's character, which is usually fairly convincing at the beginning, becomes more and more confused as the book progresses. In each of them there are several minor characters more convincing than those to whom the author devotes most of his attention. Each is at its worst when it deals with sex and idealism. Each contains to some degree what we have seen to have been the two outstanding weaknesses of his first novels: a preoccupation with “the meaning of life” that leads him to put his personal problems to characters in a book, and an inclination to tell himself fairy stories about life instead of going through the hard work of actually understanding and expressing it. And each is written with a mastery of technique that is at times amazing.

It may be instructive to enquire briefly into some of the possible reasons for Anderson's shortcomings as a novelist. It would be easy to blame most of them on his theory that the true history of life is a history of moments—and by moments, Anderson means, of course, climactic moments—did not the flaw go deeper, were it not that his very way of looking at life, his comprehension of it force him to adopt this theory. If Anderson were a great writer, if he were able to grasp all of the important causes of these “moments” and to deduce all the significant results from them, his theory would work quite as well in a novel as in a short story. But he does not possess that gift. In a book like Winesburg, Ohio, for instance, he showed that he knew pretty well what was happening at a given “moment.” Even in that book, however, there was little comprehension of what went on before and what followed. A novel almost always moves from one “moment” to another. If they do not flow naturally one into another, if they are not combined and related, the novel, instead of gaining in effectiveness as it proceeds, loses it. This is what happens to Anderson's novels. The really effective episodes are rarely those which bear directly on the main story; much more often they are detached vignettes, sketches of minor characters, “colorful” episodes inserted to establish a desired atmosphere.

Thus it is fair to say that one of the chief troubles with Anderson's writing, if indeed it be not the principal one, is his lack of actual knowledge of his characters. This failing he disguises at once. He has a vivid imagination of the type possessed by children who tell each other stories. When his interpretive imagination fails him and he lacks actual facts, he falls back upon this childish imagination. He makes up stories about characters and situations that “will do just as well,” and when he does that, instead of “being true to the essence of things,” he reconstructs events as he would like them to have been. He has an innate feeling that life is wrong and when he falls back upon this childish imagination, he remakes it as he feels it should be—which is essentially the method of the “Pollyanna” school of writing which he so detests. True writing consists in heightening life, not in disguising it.

In the foreword to Tar, Anderson admits his failing and tries to excuse it. “All tale telling,” he writes, “is, in a strict sense, nothing but lying. This is what people cannot understand. To tell the truth is too difficult. I long since gave up the effort.” Real writing is not lying, as Anderson himself proved in Winesburg, Ohio and in passages in his other books. Neither is it too difficult to tell the truth when one is conscious of a truth to be told, as Anderson is at times. It is only when he has nothing to say that Anderson descends to lying.

Before continuing our discussion of these novels, it is necessary to note in passing one legend which has grown up about Anderson and which he himself has done a great deal to spread. It is the picture of a dynamic man who sees all, feels all, and understands all but is kept from telling what he knows by his insuperable inarticulateness. It is the picture of a clumsy, uneducated man groping for words with which to express himself. The image is highly fallacious. Few American writers have had the sheer virtuosity, the fluency, the control over words that Anderson possesses. He can put words together so well that he can say nothing for pages on end and still entice on even a reluctant reader; there comes, of course, an aftermath of resentment at being thus deluded, but Anderson reduces it to a minimum by cannily distracting the reader's attention from what has happened by awakening new hopes for the future, and by subtly arousing in his mind a question as to whether he actually understood all that the author had to say.

When Anderson has something to say he says it, and says it effectively. What he is groping so painfully for is for something to say. Despite his varied experience in early life, the number of things about which he writes is strictly limited. Most of the important events in his own life he has described from three to half a dozen times. Anderson has devoted himself to writing as people of old devoted themselves to the crafts. He has learned every trick of the story teller's trade. Writing has given him a refuge from “the tangle of things of daily life”; it has provided him with an extensive outlet for his restless and dramatic imagination and a chance to practice the craftsmanship that he has come to think of as the only road to personal satisfaction. But, and perhaps in this lies Anderson's great tragedy, he lacks the raw material with which to pursue his craft. He must skimp and be niggardly. Having constructed, he must tear down and re-use the material. The paucity of his material is not so noticeable in the limited space of a short story; in a novel it becomes striking. And when, thus handicapped, he holds religiously to the production of at least one volume each year, his failing becomes somewhat a matter for public concern.

In his third novel, as in his first two, Anderson tells the story, so dear to American ears, of the penniless country lad who makes a fortune—and as before he adds his own little moral to the effect that money and the power that go with it don't make a man happy. But Poor White, despite its plot, has more to recommend it than had Anderson's first two novels. It contains, for one thing, a fine description of the transition of a Middle Western town from a small farming community to a thriving industrial center, and in it there are also some valid observations as to the effect of that change on various individuals. A few of the sketches of minor characters almost reach the plane Anderson achieved in Winesburg, Ohio, but the hero and heroine are insipid puppets.

Hugh McVey is represented as being a listless and anemic descendant of Huck Finn, who lives in the Missouri village of Mudcat Landing, on the Mississippi. He comes under the influence of a sharp-tongued, thrifty, energetic New England woman, who “with all her mother's soul wanted to protect Hugh.” He is unbelievably lazy and shiftless by nature, but so strong is the woman's influence upon him that, when he leaves her care and is working as a section hand in another town, he never allows himself a moment of repose for fear of becoming a loafer again. He would sometimes, we are told, spend most of the night going through the town counting the pickets in the fences in front of the houses. After which he would estimate the number of pickets that could be cut out of an ordinary-sized tree; and then how many could be cut from all the trees in town. Later, if there were time, he would snatch a few hours' sleep and start for work.

Anderson often verges on the ridiculous in his description of Hugh and occasionally he achieves it.

As a result of his fear of doing nothing, Hugh masters the intricacies of applied mechanics (the correspondence schools lending the author a helping hand), and becomes an inventor. He invents machines for planting cabbages, for loading hay, for dumping loaded freight cars into the holds of ships and becomes rich and famous.

He marries the daughter of a rich farmer and industrial promoter. His wife has been to college, has thought a good deal about the place of “modern woman” in the world, but hasn't solved many problems. On the bridal evening Hugh sneaks out of the bedroom when his new wife isn't looking, muttering, “I won't let her do it,” and wanders around the fields all night. It isn't until a week later that he musters the nerve to consummate the marriage. The book ends on a hopeful but confused note with the passing of Clara, the college graduate, into the background. “At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Within her arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength of the roots of a tree.” One wonders a bit whether that is Anderson's advice to all women, or whether it merely works in Clara's case. One is not even convinced that Clara will get so far just because she stops thinking. Perhaps Anderson got tired.

The main points of the story do not come much closer to ringing true than most conventional “log cabin to mansion” stories, or the blurb of a press agent about a famous inventor. There are a few pages in the novel, however, in which Anderson catches admirably the thrill, the excitement, the exuberant heedless optimism that ran through the country with the coming of factories.

There is an admirable portrait of Joe Wainsworth, the harness maker: “I know my trade and do not have to bow down to any man. … Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk. The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the devil.” Joe, of course, is pushed to the wall by machine-made goods. Anderson greatly injures the portrait at the end by a flagrantly over-dramatic episode wherein Joe murders his assistant. Jim, a farm hand, Tom Butterworth, the rich farmer and promoter, and Steve Hunter, “an early Rotarian,” are also convincingly sketched.

In Poor White Anderson's day-dreaming qualities are most in evidence; in Many Marriages his worry about “problems” runs away with him.

Many Marriages is a good example of what is often spoken of as Anderson's “mysticism.” It is not real mysticism at all, but mystification. It is Anderson's old search for “the meaning of life” dramatized, sentimentalized, disguised in a soft mush of words with a little unsuccessful symbolism thrown in for flavoring. In his first novels Anderson came right out with his problems and his attempted solutions; it was direct and vigorous, if unsuccessful. There is a whining, insinuating note in Many Marriages that becomes increasingly annoying. The book is filled with prose poems that don't come off, with endless petty yearnings and complaints. Anderson has stretched out the material for a mediocre short story into a full length novel and has made the material itself worthless in the process. The book rambles; repeats words, thoughts, symbols; were it not so thoroughly confused and meaningless, it would come very close to being immoral.

There are four characters: John Webster, a middle-aged manufacturer, who feels that he isn't getting what he should out of life; Mrs. Webster, a dumpy useless woman without a trace of emotional or intellectual life; Jane Webster, the daughter, without convictions, emotions or ideas, who will turn out to be like her mother but whom John Webster thinks he can “save”; Natalie Schwartz, the stenographer who placidly accepts her employer's love. Except for John Webster, none of the other characters ever achieve any semblance of life. The plot is simple. Webster decides to desert his wife and his business and to go off with his stenographer, with whom he falls in love because she is the only other woman he sees. Before leaving he wants to explain his action to his daughter.

Anderson feels vaguely that there is something noble in the man's action; but at the end of the book, after two hundred and fifty pages of listening to the workings of Webster's mind, when he and Natalie Schwartz walk out into the night and Mrs. Webster commits suicide, the reader has a distinct impression that Webster hasn't made a very noble gesture, that he hasn't made much progress toward solving his problems, and that within a few weeks he will wish desperately that he could run back to his home, his wife and his business.

The whole book works up to the climactic scene where Webster arranges an altar in his bedroom, with candles, a crucifix and a painting of the Madonna. He then undresses and struts before this altar in what Anderson would have us believe an ecstasy of cleanliness and regeneration. The pot-bellied, be-spectacled little man has become a mystic! …

The last hundred and fifty pages of the book might easily be disgusting were they not ridiculous. Naked before this altar, Webster tells his daughter, who is clad in a thin nightgown, what he thinks about life and love, and from time to time he half makes love to her himself.

Many Marriages is Anderson run completely amuck. It is a painful book to read, for the author is obviously striving to be honest and sincere; he is writing with the utmost seriousness and is trying to portray the intangible, subtle nuances of life. The harder he tries, the more ridiculous the story becomes.

At the bottom of Many Marriages is an incurably romantic and sentimental outlook on life. Anderson is trying to read into life things that aren't there at all, or, perhaps better, which aren't at all where he thinks they are.

In Dark Laughter we have a new Anderson; he is restrained, mellow, observant; no longer does he torture himself about “the meaning of life”; nor does he remake it. He is writing autobiographically, but he maintains a certain objectiveness and detachment; he rearranges facts, but in the process does not destroy them. Never before or since has he handled a hero so well; he still holds to his “moments” theory, but the moments are so coördinated and related that one flows naturally into another. Bruce Dudley is substantially the same man in all parts of the book—which is more than can be said for the heroes of the other novels. When Anderson is sentimental it is with moderation; it does not upset all balance of values; indeed it lends a tone of mellowness to his writing. It is true that the novel weakens toward the end, but it is the first novel in which Anderson is able to reach the final page without collapsing. Technically it is one of his most brilliant performances; for the first time he is master of the intricacies of the novel.

Dark Laughter is easily Anderson's best novel, but seldom does it rise above the level of the second rate. It is good, skillful, perceptive writing, much better than the average “competent” novel, but still not very exciting when compared to the best of this or of other ages. Anderson has overcome a good many of his faults but in so doing he has dissipated a number of his positive virtues. The book shows very plainly the influence, either direct or indirect, of such writers as Joyce and Proust; and it is feeble compared to the work of either of them.

It is possible that in Dark Laughter Anderson is attempting to work out, from an entirely different point of view, what he tried so unsuccessfully to do in Many Marriages. Bruce Dudley, like John Webster, gets fed up with his job and his wife and decides to leave them both. Starting from Chicago, he drifts down the Mississippi to New Orleans, loafs about for a while, returns to the Indiana town where he was born, works in an automobile factory and later as a gardener, falls in love with his employer's wife and runs away with her before the bewildered husband's eyes. Except for the final elopement, which is in the nature of a dramatic after-thought dragged in to provide the conventional climax, the book runs a steady, compelling, impressive course.

Gone are the fake mysticism and hysterical sentimentality. When Bruce Dudley leaves his wife he merely walks out the door; neither he nor she have any deep feeling about it. Anderson has shown convincingly that their married life had become a not very satisfactory economic arrangement, unsupported by emotional or intellectual sympathy. They lived together, but except for half-hearted quarrels they had no relations that were not formal and essentially meaningless. Bruce was a tired, superficially cynical newspaper reporter who didn't want commercial success. His wife was a clever hack writer who was destined before long to become highly successful. She was pushing and energetic; he lazy and desirous of taking things easy; he had a nebulous desire to write but didn't let it worry him.

His guiding philosophy was that “when things got settled you were through, might as well sit in a rocking chair waiting for death. Death, before life came.” He dreaded becoming the type of man who “wanted a nice, firm little wall built around him, who wanted to be safe behind the wall, feel safe. A man within the walls of a house, safe, a woman's hand holding his hand, warmly—awaiting him. All others shut out by the walls of the house.”

Bruce, drifting down the Mississippi in a rowboat, lying naked on a bed on a hot New Orleans night listening to the laughter and songs of the niggers, painting wheels in an automobile factory, unhurried, undisturbed, loafing, thinking when thoughts come to him but not seeking them, content merely to enjoy the simple acts and sights of life without worry about past or future, reminiscing and day-dreaming Bruce is a more lackadaisical Huck Finn grown up and returned to his old haunts. At times Anderson makes Bruce out to be the content, irresponsible wanderer that every man at some time or other dreams of becoming.

The story is a thoroughly Proustian psychological monologue; Bruce, working in the automobile factory, is reminiscing to himself, and through his wandering thoughts we get his life as he has seen it. The tempo of the story is admirably controlled; never does the monologue become unintentionally monotonous; soliloquies, psychological analyses, descriptions, lyric moments, anecdotes are woven into a lively and harmonious pattern. At times apparently confused, the total effect of the story is one of great simplicity and cohesion.

There are, however, a number of technical defects. After the manner of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Anderson sometimes attempts to achieve the effect of recurrent ideas in a man's mind by repeating thoughts, words and phrases in a sort of refrain; but he fails to attain the desired result and leaves us instead conscious of the poverty and lack of variety of his material. Also the dialogue, as in most of his books, is abominable. The characters speak more often in Anderson's own idiom than in their own. As has already been remarked, toward the end of the book Anderson falls back into the melodramatic faults of his early novels, but even so, Dark Laughter is for him a tremendous step forward.

Early in the novel we are given Anderson's definition of art, at which no one could quibble: “Art is something out beyond reality, a fragrance touching the reality of things through the fingers of a humble man filled with love.” It is only unfortunate that, necessary as they are, humility and love are not the only qualities requisite for the production of art.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND ESSAYS

If one really wants to know Sherwood Anderson, the writer, it is only necessary to turn to A Story Teller's Story; there one finds Anderson, all of Anderson that gets into his books, and a good deal of the man behind the books. In A Story Teller's Story Anderson is yarning, yarning about what he has done, where he has been, what he has seen, about people he has met and observations he has made. Some of it actually happened, some of it didn't, but it is all Sherwood Anderson.

It is a rambling, informal collection of reminiscences, essays, imaginings; it contains character sketches that rank with Anderson's better works, autobiographical anecdotes that have obviously served as the bases for much of his writing, observations upon life and manners in America of which some are confused and insipid and others so vivid, spontaneous and accurate that they take one's breath away. One gets the impression that Anderson, forgetful of art, unself-conscious for once, is merely sitting down to tell a succession of interesting stories confident that his audience isn't bored. Perhaps it is not quite exact to say that he is unself-conscious; Anderson never for a moment forgets his audience; he is watching it, playing with it, experimenting. But his self-consciousness is that of an actor rather than of a man unsure of himself.

The volume is divided into four books. The first deals with his boyhood, the same boyhood that he has so often described in his other works. The poor family living in haunted houses to escape paying rent, three boys sleeping in a single bed to save bedclothes, the silent impressive mother and the talkative, story-telling vagrant father. Although he manages to describe the atmosphere in which he grew up, most of the hundred and thirty pages of the first book are devoted to the telling of two stories: one supposedly by his father, “Major” Anderson, in which various romantic episodes in the Civil War are revised and described; the other by Sherwood himself when he is lying buried in the hay in a farmer's barn telling himself about smugglers and South American revolutionists with fierce cruel eyes, bronze complexions and black mustaches. These stories are unalloyed sentimental romances of a Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan Magazine type. But they pretend to be nothing else, and as such they are amusing interludes.

The second book is largely composed of anecdotes about his life during the years spent wandering around the country immediately after leaving home when his mother died. He works with race horses, in a bicycle factory, rolls kegs of nails out of a warehouse and loads them on trucks, reminisces about his boyhood, fights with a fellow workman and tries to bluff his chambermaid into believing that he won the fight, saves money for drinking and reading bouts, and finally enlists for the Spanish American war to avoid returning to a factory. He includes several good character sketches among the rambling anecdotes.

The third book contains the description, already quoted, of Anderson's leaving his wife and business in Elyria; a statement of his philosophy as a writer; a lyric bit about the joys of sitting before a piece of white paper, as yet untouched by a pencil; a few miscellaneous anecdotes and a superb passage about America. In justice to Anderson this last should be quoted. Perhaps never before has one side of the American psychology been so well summarized:

“In America … something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! We did get ourselves into a bad hole. We were going to be superhuman and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we are somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch.

“We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves occasionally to laugh at ourselves for our pretensions, but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ We actually meant it and no one will ever understand presentday America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big ugly hurriedly-thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the cathedral of Chartres to the Glory of God.

“They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and the free Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. This we might have found out long ago but that we did not know each other. We came from too many different places to know each other well, had been promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know each other.

“Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave simple fine men! And how sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understand and love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no more brave, heroic and fine than the people of almost any other part of the world.”

The short fourth book tells how it feels to become a successful writer, to go to New York and meet all the important literary people, and to take a trip to Europe. The book ends with an epilogue in which Anderson describes the visit to him of a successful writer of football stories who wants to go in for something a little more “artistic.”

A Story Teller's Story is one of the most interesting documents that has come out of America in the last two decades. A hundred years from now it will still be a valuable source book. It will describe in abundant detail the psychological and emotional reactions of a super-sensitive, sentimental melodramatic man who was unable to adjust himself to an industrialized America. It will show a number of the processes whereby America changed from an incongruous, jumbled “melting pot” into a homogeneous nation with as definite a character and as varied idiosyncrasies as those of any European nation. And it will show the hardships worked upon unadaptable individuals by this process of standardization and assimilation. A Story Teller's Story may well be Anderson's most enduring book; it is perhaps the least pretentious of his works, but it comes closer to achieving its purpose than anything else he has written.

As Anderson explains in the preface, Tar started out to be an autobiographical account of his boyhood told in the first person, but that method of attack proved unsatisfactory, so he called himself “Tar” Moorehead and went on with the story. It is a remarkable testimonial to Anderson's craftsmanship that Tar is readable. In it he merely retells the same childhood that he has described so often before; the characters, the atmosphere, the feeling are identically the same. Yet the incidents are different and somehow one is not much oppressed by a sense of repetition.

Tar himself is an idealized memory. There never was, never could have been a boy like that. Anderson remembers the events of his boyhood, but he has forgotten the emotions he had. What the book achieves is a description of what the mature Anderson would have felt had he been able to reënact the events of his childhood. The agony, the sordidness, the ecstasy, the indescribable importance of unimportant events, the vividness of all emotional reactions are passed over. The young Tar possesses a saneness, a philosophical impassiveness that no child ever enjoyed, and certainly not such a child as was the hyper-sensitive Anderson. In short, the character of Tar has been so idealized that it is flat.

What one carries away from the book is the memory of a series of sharp, vivid snapshots: the death of the old woman in the snowstorm, the white body in the moonlight, the dogs running in a circle around her; Tar's shy love for the Farley girl and his idealization of her; his adventure with Mame Thompson in the hayloft, his fright and loss of nerve and later shame and regret that he lost his nerve; the loneliness of the “bad” woman, her affection for Tar and his understanding of her; the night the train came in late when Tar, accompanied by his restless sister, delivered his papers after midnight; their walk through the cemetery on the black rainy night, the sound of groaning, the flash of lightning that showed Hawkins, the filthy hog dealer, praying in the rain beside his wife's grave; Tar's glimpse through the back window of the drug clerk's house as the latter and his wife are making love; the contrast between the poverty of the Mooreheads with their thin cabbage stew and the abundance of food on the tables of Tar's friends; the evening when Tar's father came home drunk to an embarrassed, silent, frightened family. Tar himself is never quite real, but many of the things he does are.

Anderson's material is thinner, but he squeezes more out of what he has.

Sherwood Anderson's Notebook resembles suspiciously a collection of pot boilers. Most of the essays and sketches in it had been previously printed in such magazines as The Nation, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, The Dial. There is little in the volume that warrants detailed discussion. The essay entitled “A Note on Realism” is an interesting presentation of Anderson's literary philosophy, but we can consider that to better advantage a little further on. For the rest, the book contains rather insipid extracts, apparently from Anderson's diary; sketches of Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, George Bellows and Alfred Stieglitz; and a few other miscellaneous essays.

POETRY

Two of Anderson's books, Mid-American Chants and A New Testament, may most easily be classified as poetry. They are unlike his usual prose; they are not essays; they very patently echo many of Walt Whitman's thoughts; they attempt to recapture the rhythm of certain passages from the Old Testament; and they bear evidence to a lyrical urge on the author's part.

Anderson himself presents them with modesty. In the foreword to Mid-American Chants he writes, “For this book of chants I ask only that it be allowed to stand stark against the background of my own place and generation. … In secret a million men and women are trying, as I have tried here, to express the hunger within and I have dared put these chants forth only because I hope and believe that they may find an answering and clearer call in the hearts of other Mid-Americans.”

I am inclined to class these two volumes as clever and sometimes interesting experiments with new combinations of sounds and new methods of expression. Without defining the nebulous boundaries of poetry, I would say that these books carry prose perilously close to poetry. But they remain prose, they remain experimental, they remain confused, and despite their occasional cleverness they are never successful enough to make one forget that essentially they are tours de force. I think of Anderson writing them to blow off steam—because he has been feeling the limitations and restrictions of the usual prose forms, because he is exasperated at life or at something that has happened, because by employing this new medium he is able to consolidate and concentrate more than in prose, or merely because he feels poetic and thinks that he should be writing poetry.

The “poems” vary in mood and in quality quite as much as Anderson's other writing. Many of them voice the hysterical complaining wail of a baffled and defeated man, as, for instance, this passage from “Chicago”:

“I am a child, a confused child in a confused
          world. There are no clothes made that fit me.
          The minds of men cannot clothe me. Great
          projects arise within me. I have a brain and
          it is cunning and shrewd.
I want leisure to become beautiful, but there
          is no leisure. Men should bathe me with
          prayers and with weeping, but there are no
          men.”

Most of these poems deal to some extent with the difficulty the artist has in combating the crass blatant ugliness of industrial life. In the “Song of Industrial America” Anderson catches that note especially well:

“They tell themselves so many little lies, my be-
          loved. Now wait, little one—we can't sing.
          We are standing in a crowd, by a bridge, in
          the West. Hear the voices—turn around—
          let's go home—I'm tired. They tell them-
          selves so many little lies.
You remember in the night we arose. We were
          young. There was smoke in the passage and
          you laughed. Was it good—that black
          smoke? Look away to the streams and the
          lake. We're alive. See my hand—how it
          trembles on the rail.
Here is song, here in America, here now, in our
          time. Now wait—I'll go to the train. I'll
          not swing off into tunes. I'm all right—I
          just want to talk. …
You know my city—Chicago triumphant—fac-
          tories and marts and the roar of machines—
          horrible, terrible, ugly and brutal.
It crushed things down and down. Nobody
          wanted to hurt. They didn't want to hurt
          me or you. They were caught themselves.
          I know the old men here—the millionaires.
          I've always known old men all my life. I'm
          old myself. You would never guess how old
          I am.
Can a singer arise and sing in this smoke and
          grime? Can he keep his throat clear? Can
          his courage survive?
I'll tell you what it is—now you be still. To Hell
          with you. I'm an old empty barrel floating
          in the stream—that's what I am. You stand
          away. I've come to life. My arms lift up—
          I begin to swim.
Hell and damnation—turn me loose. The floods
          come on. That isn't the roar of the trains at
          all. It's the flood—the terrible, horrible
          flood turned loose.”

Several of the chants are hackneyed, sentimental and obviously derived, as, for instance, “Song to the Sap”:

In my breasts the sap of spring,
In my brain gray winter, bleak and hard,
Through my whole being, surging strong and
                    sure,
The call of gods,
The forward push of mystery and of life …
From all of Mid-America a prayer,
To newer, braver gods, to dawns and days,
To truth and cleaner, braver life we come.
Lift up a song,
My sweaty men,
Lift up a song.

A New Testament is even more introspective, sentimental and technically experimental than the first volume of poems. Anderson is worrying about himself, attempting to analyze his reactions to people and to life in general, to decide what he is and what things are and what the relations between them actually are. In the process he comes to identify himself with trees, houses, streets, people, landscapes, thoughts, cities.

          At times, just for a moment, I am a Cæsar, a
Napoleon, an Alexander. I tell you it is true.
          If you men who are my friends and those of
you who are acquaintances could surrender your-
selves to me for just a little while.
          I tell you what—I would take you within my-
self and carry you around with me as though I
were a pregnant woman.

Most of Anderson's confessions and musings are confused and lushly sentimental. His baffledness over the meaning of life; his consciousness that he might have been a great writer and that he has not made full use of his potentialities; his flooding, overflowing sympathy for things in general and the difficulty he finds in fixing it on the concrete; his wistful romanticism; his insight into things and his inability to group his perceptions into a cohesive unity; his almost psychopathic introspection—all find their outlet here and combine to give us a picture of the baffled “pregnant” man who is Sherwood Anderson. But often before Anderson has given us this picture; it pours out of each book he has written. There is nothing new in what he says; it is merely said more sentimentally. One can understand how in a period of unusual bewilderment or depression he may have written these poems; school and college boys often have the same impulse; one wonders that he should publish them as they are.

There are, however, a few amusing experiments with word pictures, of which the following, from “Song Number Four,” is a good example:

          You are a small man sitting in a dark room in
the early morning. Look, you have killed a
woman. Her body lies on the floor. Her face is
white and your hands tremble. A testament is
creeping from between your teeth. It makes your
teeth chatter.
          You are a young man in the schools.
          You walk up the face of a hill.
          You are an insane driver of sheep.
          You are a woman in a brown coat, a fish mer-
chant in a village, a man who throws coal in at the
mouth of a furnace, a maiden who presses the body
of her lover against the face of the wall.
          You are a bush.
          You are a wind.
          You are the gun of a soldier.
          You are the hide that has been drawn over the face of a drum.
          You are a young birch tree swaying in a wind.
          You are one who has been slain by a falling tree in a forest.
          Your body has been destroyed by a flying mass of iron in the midst of a battle.
          Your voice comes up out of a great confusion.
          Listen, little lost one, I am testifying to you as
I creep along the face of a wall. I am making a
testament as I gather stones and lay them along
the face of a wall.

There can be no doubt that these lines have a certain effectiveness. It is as though a dozen movie reels had been cut haphazardly, stuck together, and run flickering over the screen many times too fast but occasionally coming to a full stop. It is interesting to see that this effect can be produced with words, but it is not especially enlightening. Anderson has made public a laboratory experiment that has not yet and is not likely to come to a definite end.