SOURCE: Wixson, Douglas. “Sherwood Anderson and the Midwestern Literary Radicalism in the 1930s.” Midwestern Miscellany 23 (1995): 28-39.

[In the following essay, Wixson explores Anderson's place in the literary political landscape of the 1930s in the United States.]

“We are in the new age. Welcome, men, women and children into
          the new age.
Will you accept it?
Will you go into the factories to work?
Will you quit having contempt for those who work in the
          factories?”

—Sherwood Anderson, “Machine Song: Automobile”¹

In the course of exploring a group of writers who contributed to little magazines published in Moberly, Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Peoria, and other Midwestern towns during the 1930s I discovered, not surprisingly, that Sherwood Anderson's name was invoked, sometimes deprecatingly but more often appreciatively. Critics and literary historians of the 1930s tend to gather the work of writers on the left whose subject-matter involved working-class people into a loosely-defined category called “proletarian literature.” It was a term the writers themselves frequently used without knowing for sure what it meant. “Proletarian” was a politically loaded term suggesting alignment with a Communist-oriented cultural movement in the 1930s that viewed society from a class perspective. To young radical writers like Joseph Kalar, Jack Conroy, Robert Cruden, Warren Huddlestone, Meridel Le Sueur, Sanora Babb, Joseph Vogel, H. H. Lewis, Paul Corey, and Ed Falkowski, proletarian sounded like a foreign import poorly translated into American working-class life: they used it without fully appreciating its origin or implications. Class, on the other hand, had unmediated meanings grounded in personal experience.

Possessing little Marx and less Engels, the Midwest literary radicals drew upon indigenous traditions of protest and progressive thought in responding to economic crises and the perceived failure of government to curb or eliminate them. The generation of Midwest radicals who came of age in the 1920s and produced most of their work in the economic Depression that caught them in its coils responded to the proletarian movement feelingly without participating in the ideological discussions taking place “east of the Hudson,” the expression the Midwesterners often used to indicate, from their perspective, the geographical location of East Coast intellectuals, implying both the latter's propensity to fruitless debate and their blindness with respect to events and people in the hinterlands. The pragmatic Midwesterners had little patience with long-winded discussions of political theory in John Reed Club meetings and New York “coffee pots.” Conroy liked to say that he had no interest in counting how many Marxian angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Fostered by editors like H. L. Mencken, John T. Frederick, Conroy, Richard Johns, Ben Hagglund, Noah Whitaker, Dale Kramer, Kerker Quinn, Frederick Maxham, and others, the Midwest radical writers hoped to carry on the work of Dreiser, Norris, and Anderson in laying bare the realities of Midwest existence.² Like Sherwood Anderson before them, the young literary radicals viewed themselves as “untutored Midwestern story tellers.” Distinguishing them from Anderson, on the other hand, were issues of generational difference and historical circumstance—and the fact that Anderson's work achieved wide acclaim while theirs came under the shadow of literary oblivion during the Cold War which witnessed the decline of critical realism, as Maxwell Geismar points out, and the repressive effects of de facto censorship.

In a letter to his literary pen-pal in 1924, Warren Huddlestone, Joe Kalar describes the effect of first looking into Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Kalar had sold his collection of Lone Scout magazines to purchase Modern Library editions of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Whitman's poems.

At times (Kalar writes) I come upon a writer whom I envy. Then I bewail my apparent crudities—not realizing for a moment that I am seventeen and but starting out on my literary career, while the other is at the height of his creative power. There are very few present day writers that I feel I will not be able some day to surpass. Anderson is the greatest American today. My admiration for Ben Hecht is in the decline. Anderson, one feels, has guts to him. His stories flow deep, if slow. He has a solidity to him that is admirable. I am not well acquainted yet with Dreiser as yet—though I intend to be soon. Dreiser and Anderson are the leaders. …

And in a subsequent letter, Kalar compliments Huddlestone's story patterned on Anderson's “I'm a Fool”:

I can't forget “A Perfect Fool,” and the other story that you were so kind as to let me peruse. In them there appeared to be the kernel of a slumbering genius, a writer with talent who could take up the work when Anderson makes his exit, and do it well.

(Kalar 134-5)

Kalar and Huddlestone were two very young Midwesterners at the time who “met,” as most of the Midwest radicals did, through little magazines that served as circuits of communication connecting isolated young men and women living in small towns throughout the Midwest. Kalar, like Huddlestone, submitted juvenalia to the Lone Scout, the Bohemian, and other ephemeral magazines.

Born in a Slovenian community in northern Minnesota, Kalar had trained to become a teacher but abandoned the profession after a year in isolated Koochiching County. Unable to find employment as a journalist, he worked in paper mills and saw mills. During brief “proletarian nights”—to borrow the title of one of his poems—between days of factory labor, he slaked off the residue of flowery diction and preciosity, the “Victorian hangover,” as the radicals called it. Kalar began submitting his work to the new crop of radical magazines appearing in the late 1920s and early '30s—New Masses, Rebel Poet, Anvil, The Left. The aesthetic of early Depression-era “proletarian” writing called for narratives deriving from personal observation and experience, written with vigor and conviction. Personal narrative and documentary were welcomed. Factory life provided Kalar plenty of material; his writing quickly lost its jejeune romantic coloring on “the anvil of experience.”

Huddlestone, raised in Kokomo, Indiana, likewise got his start as a writer submitting pieces to the Lone Scout magazine, a publication of the Lone Scout organization which was the rural equivalent of the urban Boy Scouts except that the Lone Scouts gave attention to intellectual development. The publication served as a networking center for youngsters with literary aspirations living in widely scattered locales. An avid reader, “Hud,” as he was known, assisted his father, a housepainter, until work dried up in the early Depression. Unwilling to burden his parents, Hud tramped around the United States, hungry and homeless, an experience that supplied material for sketches and stories submitted to editors such as Conroy and Malcolm Cowley. What attracted Kalar and Huddlestone to Anderson's writing was the possibility that an “untutored” young person from the provinces might learn his craft through emulation and sharp observation. There was also the important question of form. Anderson had demonstrated, in fact argued, that “formless” story methods do greater truth to life than do formal techniques such as plot. “Life” was something the radicals were receiving in heavy doses in the early Depression. But how best to write about it?

The notion of writing as learned craft rather than divinely inspired “art” was attractive to the Midwest radicals who in demystifying literature hoped to make it more accessible, and in a sense, more democratic. Anderson had himself apprenticed his writing craft in trade journals: to Kalar, Huddlestone and others he was an “ordinary” person who, possessed of a wealth of experience, desired to communicate his vision of things from within the crucible of small Midwestern life—a crucible that continued to produce young people who longed to break out of their isolation and make contact through their writing. Anderson's example was instructive and emboldening.

Growing up during the early years of industrialism in this crucible of experience—the villages, mining camps, and small factory towns of the midlands with their sense of settled community—was an experience that the radicals shared; yet each had a different story to tell. Moberly, Missouri was, like Clyde, Ohio, a railroad division point whose central feature was the railroad station where destinies were engaged in the arrivals and departures of townspeople and visitors. Born in a nearby coal camp, Jack Conroy entered an apprenticeship in the Wabash railroad shops in Moberly at age thirteen. The railroad reading room and the Carnegie library in Moberly were his “university.”

As recording secretary of his union local, Conroy submitted his earliest writings to the Railway Carmen's Journal. Kalar, Huddlestone, Conroy, and other Midwest radicals grew up when the older rural economy and craft trades that Anderson celebrated in his early writings had begun to yield to industrial development and small town commerce. The radicals, with the possible exception of Meridel Le Sueur, raised no protest to the fact of industrialism itself, only to the terms on which it functioned. The “mad awakening” (131) that Anderson writes about in Poor White when “the giant, Industry, awoke” (133) was to them an established fact; a handful of intellectuals and artists-expatriates had fled to Europe in the 1920s seeking to escape it, but the Midwest literary radicals had no such option. They were exiles in their native land. Worker-writers like Kalar and Conroy felt the realities of industrialism in their aching muscles and heads numbed by noise and routine—the same mind-numbing dullness that Anderson had complained about in his factory jobs. After the failed Great Railroad Strike of 1922 in which Conroy, along with thousands of other striking railroad workers, was forced to find other employment, there seemed to exist little choice but continue as laborer. Writing would have to take place in-between factory shifts and during periods of unemployment, made anxious by family responsibilities. Moreover, to attempt to escape working class existence, as their intelligence and ambition appeared to prepare them to do, meant to abandon the very conditions which nurtured them and their writing—and which they hoped to improve through efforts to give them expression.

Anderson had found little literary matter in the talk of his fellow workers. They “talk vilely to their fellows,” he recalled later (A Story Teller's Story 148-50). “There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men's lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian” (148). Elsewhere, in commenting on Whitman's and Sandburg's views on workers, Anderson wrote: “already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my heroes” (107). The rejection of factory existence and of workers' values that Anderson expresses in his autobiography, A Story Teller's Story, seemed irrelevant to the Midwest radicals who, in the early years of the Depression, hoped through revolutionary struggle to forge a new existence for the factory worker, the dispossessed “proletariat.” On occasion, however, they expressed disgust with their fellow factory workers—their behavior and aspirations—in private correspondence. Their status—both worker and writer—placed them in an ambivalent position vis à vis other workers. This position was both a strength and a source of conflict.

In Worker-Writer in America I describe the ambivalent status, the necessary counterpart of the “proletarian night” in which the worker-writers struggled to create something of literary worth, had to do with the fact that although they worked in factory jobs and were of working-class origins, they thought like intellectuals. Accepted by their work colleagues on equal terms, nonetheless, they were perceived as being different in this respect: they read, liked to discuss ideas, and aspired to write. Forsaking the sleep of the ordinary laborer, they pursued their literary ambitions at night. The paradox of their situation was that unskilled labor left their minds hungry for intellectual stimulus, yet bodily fatigue demanded rest. During feverish nights, the brief interstices during which literary activity could occur, the worker-writer is released to his imagination. This liminal space, the correlative of necessity and aspiration distinguishes worker-writers from their factory colleagues. The hyphenation joining worker and writer engenders ambivalences within which creativity takes place.

More familiar to the general reader are the ambivalences incurred when working-class subjects cross class boundaries, such as occurs in the work of D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, and Sherwood Anderson. Literature has generally treated labor as a prison-house from which the bright youngster seeks escape through intellectual achievement. The situation of the worker-writer, however, engenders ambivalences of another kind, reconciled in the uneasy balance between the two statuses, worker and writer. Conroy felt comfortable in the familiarity of working-class existence—the existence in which Anderson felt alienated—which he was loath to exchange for something uncertain. Both Kalar and Conroy felt this. What promise in the early Depression years was there, after all, for a better life? In the streets were jobless white-collar professionals along with dispossessed factory workers. Kalar and Conroy craved recognition. Authorial status, reputation, would, on the other hand, introduce new ambivalences, the loss of the hyphenated status, separation from the workers' world. Such choices and constraints define their literary work and energize their writing.

The longing, isolation, frustrations expressed in Anderson's work, such as Winesburg, Ohio, spoke to the Midwest radicals in immediate ways. The breakup of communal life, such as Conroy had experienced in Monkey Mining camp and the Wabash shops, meant the loss of intimacy, of human connection. The Communist Party attempted to offer programs to build new futures and new existences among the dispossessed. Party rhetoric, Conroy perceived, would not salvage the destruction of a communal past, a conclusion that Anderson likewise reached after a brief period of support to Party ideals and signing of manifestos. A workers' culture, however rude, had once existed, at least as Conroy, Le Sueur, Ed Falkowski and other radicals had known it. Any authentic tradition on the left must reflect actual experience, not wishful thinking, and serve to reproduce the cultural memory of shared values lost with the destruction of older work communities and the emergence of a new consumer-oriented mass culture. The project the radicals set before themselves was to help establish rhizomatous circuits of communication and explore new forms appropriate to a workers' culture worth its name. This renewed culture would release workers from their spiritual prison, empower them. And it would occur within the conditions that presently existed—those that Anderson had accurately perceived in earlier manifestations—the cheap subdivisions, the false consciousness, the “new order of industrialism” when “thought and poetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants of the new order” (Poor White 63-4).

This new culture would give voice to “those who do not write.” New forms were required, ones that corresponded to the conditions of working-class existence: the fact that most workers did not write or indeed even read literature; that the lack of time and education denied them access to literary tools; and that traditional literary forms were inappropriate. Most of the Midwestern radicals' early writing attempts had been instinctive affairs, unstructured and impressionistic, full of flowery diction and preciosity. Now Kalar and others began to talk about the “sketch” form. Anderson provided both models and justification for their efforts. The “plot-less” stories of Winesburg, Ohio reflected things as they were lived: “it was certain,” Anderson wrote, “There were no plot short stories ever lived in any life I had known anything about” (A Story Teller's Story 162). The problem, as Anderson saw it, was that people had got the notion from their reading of how a story should be told, and in the process “spoiled the tale in telling” (255). Plots were a trick, he wrote, to lure readers. They were of little use in exploring the buried lives of Midwest small-town people: a story should take its own course.

Anderson and the radicals turned to the same sources for the “plot-less” sketch: the Russian storytellers. In an attempt to define a proletarian aesthetic, American radical critics often borrowed—sometimes inaccurately—from the Soviets. The word Ocherkism, a virtually untranslatable term meaning the making of stories or sketches, appeared in a 1931 New Masses essay written by Leon Dennen, an American living in Moscow. Among the forms available to the literary radicals was the “sketch.” In the Soviet Union, the sketch form—skaz—had served an important literary purpose during the first Five Year Plan: Gorki defended it vigorously against critics who viewed it as a lower form of art. Actually “sketch” stories were a very old form in Russian literature: in Gogol's “The Overcoat,” plot is reduced to the minimum, personal tone is correspondingly stressed, signaling the “transfer of focus from the narrative plane to the discourse plane” (quoted in Worker-Writer in America 298). Mikhail Bakhtin underscored the oral quality of the sketch, “a socially or individually defined manner of storytelling” in contrast to literary professionalism. The storyteller is not a literary man, Bakhtin wrote; “he usually belongs to a lower social strata, to the common people … and he brings with him oral speech” (Worker-Writer 298).

It is, however, a simplification to suggest that the Midwest radicals borrowed the idea of the sketch from Anderson alone—or the Russians. There were models and examples much closer to home. E. Haldeman-Julius, for instance, penned sketches of working class life for socialist publications like the Milwaukee Leader and the Western Comrade. Most little magazine contributors were familiar with Jack London's sketches of working-class life on the bum and with Mike Gold's 120 Million. The plotless nature, the personal narrative quality of the sketch, preserving accents and idioms, was a form suited to the purposes of the Midwest radicals. Conroy, Kalar, Le Sueur, H. H. Lewis and others made abundant use of it in their writing. H. H. Lewis's prose narratives represent perhaps best the early proletarian sketch in their subjective evaluation of events and in communicating the personality of the narrator through the writing. They are scenes, really, not fully developed narratives.

It was inevitable, given the immediacy and authenticity that Conroy sought for the Anvil, that the sketch form would predominate. It was the form that most fiction writers begin with: it need not be an amateur effort, however, as Gogol's work (and Anderson's) had shown. It seemed eminently suited for Conroy's purposes and the time. In the pages of Anvil writers like Erskine Caldwell, Nelson Algren, Meridel Le Sueur, Sanora Babb, Joe Vogel, as well as others whose names have been consigned unjustifiably to the dustbins of literary history, employed the sketch form to communicate the experience of “those who do not write”—black sharecroppers, women millworkers, migrant laborers and farmhands.

Apart from the limitations of time that hampered the literary radicals, there was a suggestion that too much attention to art deprived the subject matter, drawn from life, of its vigor and authenticity. The great realist writers like Balzac had made their writing seem real, concealing their art. Literary realism, however, had become conventional, losing “a quality of authenticity,” a term that to the radicals called forth the taste of dust, the grit of factory floors, and the poignancy (and anger) of families sitting on the sidewalk in front of their foreclosed homes. Conroy, Lewis, Le Sueur, and, to a lesser extent, Kalar, eschewed verisimilitude, transforming the materials of oral and extraliterary narrative to create verbal performances that call upon the reader's imaginative participation. They gave their attention to language and the manner of telling in portraying events and people, to the point that Mencken urged Kalar “to inject a little more dramatics in the episodes” (Worker-Writer 299).

One further point I wish to make briefly: the terms of the cultural transcription that the Midwest literary radicals contemplated were essentially social, occurring not within the solitude of the individual soul but through communication with others, something akin to Dewey's notion of “conjoint communicated experience.” The voices of “those who do not write” overheard in the factories and on the streets and parks where the unemployed gathered existed dialogically on the same level as the narrator's voice. The writer's task, at least as Conroy perceived it—and I think he was joined in this by the other Midwest radicals—was to be a witness to his time, to record the inner and outer struggles.

There is something radically different from traditional ideas of authorship in this attitude toward writing, toward literary production. For example, in Conroy's writing the authorial voice of the text is only one among many voices existing on the same level. The literary work contains no single subject but a multiplicity of utterances in collective arrangements. Inscribed in the writing are the circumstances of its production, the situation, for instance, of the worker-writer who crosses boundaries and the domain of literature, in which his or her status is still undefined and his work, sensitive to the marginalized voices of his culture, fundamentally anticanonical.

Sherwood Anderson—by all lights one who benefitted from the traditional view of authorship with its hierarchical scale of literary prominence—wrote Meridel Le Sueur in 1936 about the necessity of transforming such a view. Le Sueur, along with Conroy, Dale Kramer, and others had embarked on the project of publishing a new magazine entitled Midwest—a Review. Giving Le Sueur (and Kramer) editorial advice, Anderson wrote:

Why not really run your magazine in a new way … the wrongs and injustice done writers for example quite forgotten. Let us all work for it, free, but let no man sign his work. There is all this talk, as you know, of giving up individuality, etc., let's see how deep it goes. Let's see how many of us are really interested in good work, the good life, and how many only in getting printed, getting our names up.

(Midwest 1 (November 1936):33).

Anderson's letter to Midwest challenged the radicals—after all, they had spoken of “democratizing” literature! It was a radical idea, to say the least, the proposal to abandon assigning the name of an author to the work. Was Anderson serious, or simply taking to a logical consequence the radicals' talk of doing away with individuality? Whatever the case, the Midwest radicals had in mind something quite different from Anderson's rather disingenuous proposal. Their project was to deconstruct the notion of authorship which privileges the dominant culture and marginalizes the work of creative people—including women, blacks, workers. The status of author in the traditional sense was closed to the literary radicals of the 1930s, owing to the conditions of literary production which they had attempted to alter and the social content of their work. If as a result of personal conviction, prevailing conditions of literary production, and economic necessity they sought alternatives to arborescent scales of literary reputation, they nonetheless, owed immense debts to those who had succeeded in ascending these scales. It is fair to argue, therefore, that the “greats” of Midwestern literature—Anderson, Dreiser, Garland—and the Midwest literary radicals of the 1930s comprise a continuous tradition of literary expression that focuses on both the social circumstances and inner lives of people in the isolated villages and factory towns of midland America. Theirs was a considerable achievement, for in different ways they all strove to give voice to “those who do not write.” The tragedy is that in doing so, the literary radicals, rightful epigones of the great naturalist-realist writers of the Midwest, themselves fell into obscurity, so that the task before us now is to recover them—and through them regain those lost voices.

Notes

1. Anderson's poem first appeared in Unrest, 1931, edited by Jack Conroy and Ralph Cheyney, along with poems by Midwestern literary radicals such as H. H. Lewis, Joseph Kalar, Kenneth Porter, W. D. Trowbridge, and Jim Waters.

2. Little magazine editor and Conroy's Anvil printer, Ben Hagglund, found a model in Anderson's Marion, Virginia newspaper. See Worker-Writer in America 278.

Sources

Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: Dimensions of His Literary Art. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1976.

Anderson, Sherwood. Story Teller's Story. Ed. by Ray Lewis White. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968.

———. Beyond Desire. New York: Liveright, 1932.

———. Letter to the Editor. Midwest 1 (November 1936):33.

———. Marching Men. Ed. by Ray Lewis White. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972.

———. Poor White. New York: Modern Library, 1925.

———. Sherwood Anderson's Notebook. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926.

———. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Milestone Editions, 1960.

Conroy, Jack and Ralph Cheyney, ed. Unrest. 1931. New York: Henry Harrison, 1931.

Dennen, Leon. “Soviet Literature.” New Masses 6 (November 1931):23-24.

Kalar, Joseph. Joseph A. Kalar, Poet of Protest. Ed. by Richard G. Kalar. Blaine, Minnesota: RGK Publications, 1985.

Modlin, Charles E. Sherwood Anderson, Selected Letters. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

White, Ray Lewis, ed. The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

Wixson, Douglas. Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Zandy, Janet. Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.