SOURCE: Enniss, Stephen C. “Alienation and Affirmation: The Divided Self in Sherwood Anderson's Poor White.” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 85-99.

[In the following essay, Enniss analyzes the notion of escape and, for Anderson, its consequent affirmation of self and community, in Poor White.]

It has become a critical cliché that Sherwood Anderson was a writer who tried to retell in his novels and stories his own mythic escape from his Elyria paint factory.¹ In his first novel (Windy McPherson's Son, 1916) Sam McPherson leaves behind wealth and position in order to wander the countryside working as a common laborer. Like Anderson himself, John Webster (Many Marriages, 1923) gets up from his desk and walks away from his washing machine business and his family, while John Stockton (Dark Laughter, 1925) runs away to the South and takes the name Bruce Dudley. In the stories of these lives, Anderson expresses something of the discontent of his age, though these stories also testify to his persistent belief in a better life just out of reach. Too often, however, Anderson criticism has focused on the rejection inherent in such escapes and failed to recognize the life that he sought to affirm. Lionel Trilling, writing of Anderson's preoccupation with escape, has charged that “Anderson never understood that the moment of enlightenment and conversion—the walking out—cannot be merely celebrated but must be developed, so that what begins as an act of will grows to be an act of intelligence” (215). For Anderson, however, escape was also an affirmation. If on the one hand it was a flight from the conventional, middle-class, business ethic, on the other it was an attempt to find a more meaningful life in art. Anderson's own flight from his paint factory became the symbol for both acts, the act of rejection and of affirmation.

It is my belief that this spirit of affirmation can be found throughout Anderson's stories and novels. Though Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is clearly a collection of stories of physical isolation and spiritual loneliness, it is also an expression of longing for the lost values of the community. Similarly, in his novels of escape, Anderson captures the groping of men and women towards a life that is sustaining and somehow more whole than that left behind. This tension between the forces of alienation and of affirmation is clearly evident in Poor White (1920), Anderson's novel of the industrial transformation of Bidwell, Ohio.² Like the typical Anderson hero, Hugh McVey follows a familiar pattern of rejection and affirmation as he attempts to lead a good life in the new age. Largely overlooked in previous discussions of the novel, however, is Anderson's own ambivalence in the face of the choices Hugh encounters. This confusion is most apparent in a number of conflicting descriptions of Hugh that remain unreconciled by the end of the novel. At times Anderson portrays Hugh as a man acting positively in his world in an attempt to free men and women from oppressive labor, but by the close of the novel Anderson would have us see Hugh withdrawing from the new age in an attempt to better understand himself. One view emphasizes Hugh's heroic qualities, while the other reveals more clearly Anderson's preoccupation with escape. One is an attempt to act positively in the world, the other, a negative rejection of the values of that world. These conflicting impulses within Hugh remain as evidence of an unresolved tension within Anderson himself.

From the beginning Poor White is a novel of choices. Raised by his father in a shack by the Mississippi, Hugh grows up into an idle life. His father, John McVey, is unemployed and spends his days drinking, “the easy obvious thing for him to do” (4). He loiters in the streets and on the river bank and only awakens out of his “habitual stupor” when “driven by hunger or the craving for drink” (4). On such occasions father and son go into town where they earn money sweeping out stores or cleaning cisterns and outhouses. These interruptions aside, however, life flows undisturbed. It is these early childhood experiences that shape Hugh's own dreamy nature, and later it is this idle past that Hugh struggles to reconcile to the fierce activity of the new age. It is, however, an oversimplification to view Hugh's struggle as simply one to escape his father's life by the river. Too often Sarah Shepard's judgment that John McVey is “good-for-nothing” has been accepted by critics, and the novel's later repudiation of that view overlooked.³ When Hugh turns away from his father it is “not because of resentment for his hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his own way” (5).

Sarah Shepard offers Hugh a life in direct opposition to that of his father. Her people had been hardworking men and women who had moved west in the years after the Civil War. Her father had worked in the fields clearing the land of stumps, all the while dreaming of “a future of ease” (10). When Sarah comes to Mudcat Landing, she brings with her a belief in a future reward for hard work. She reads success stories in the newspapers and magazines and dreams of her husband, Henry, becoming a railroad president or a millionaire. Driven by this dream, she admonishes Henry with her formula for success: “Do everything well. … Remember to make your reports out neatly and clearly. Show them you can do perfectly the task given you to do, and you will be given a chance at a larger task. Some day when you least expect it something will happen. You will be called up into a position of power” (11). Sarah puts her faith in that puritan work ethic which promises a future reward for hard work, but she dreams a dream of the new age, a dream of living the life of a Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Morgan.

With Sarah Shepard's arrival in Mudcat Landing, Hugh is for the first time presented with a choice between two opposing ways of life. When he goes to work for the Shepards, he finds a home life he has not had with his father. He is given new clothes to wear, and for the first time in his life he sits down to regular meals. More important for Hugh's development, however, are Sarah Shepard's attempts to make a man of him by strict discipline and hard work. After going to work for the Shepards, Hugh is faced with a choice between two extremes. He can slip easily into the animal-like existence of his father or he can adopt Sarah Shepard's circular work ethic, which rewards work well done with a new job to be well done once more. One life offers only momentary gratification, while the other offers only receding rewards.⁴

In the opening pages of Poor White Anderson describes Hugh's indecision before this choice. The companionship of the Shepards and the sense of home that Hugh finds with them seems at times “a kind of paradise” (9), but still he remains attracted to the idle life his father leads.⁵

When neither the station master nor his wife was about he went with his father to sit for half a day with his back against the wall of the fishing shack, his soul at peace. In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth his long legs. His small sleepy eyes stared out over the river. A delicious feeling crept over him and for the moment he thought of himself as completely happy and made up his mind that he did not want to return again to the railroad station and to the woman who was so determined to arouse him and make of him a man of her own people.

(13)

In this early conflict of values Anderson establishes the dichotomy that is to dominate the rest of the novel. Like George Willard and other Anderson heroes, Hugh leaves home and sets out to find a way of life that will bring him meaningful happiness. This movement, however, is not simply a celebration of escape; it is also an expression of faith in the idyllic life that Sarah Shepard had described to him.

The woman had talked of a land dotted with towns where the houses were all painted in bright colors, where young girls dressed in white dresses went about in the evening, walking under trees beside streets paved with bricks, where there was no dust or mud, where stores were gay bright places filled with beautiful wares that the people had money to buy in abundance and where every one was alive and doing things worth while and none was slothful and lazy.

(21)

Though none of the towns or cities that Hugh passes through bears any resemblance to this idyllic home that he searches for, his persistent faith in such a place gives his movements purpose and direction (he always travels east).

What Hugh does not immediately understand is that he cannot leave Mudcat Landing behind him. His own nature has been shaped by those dreamy afternoons at rest on the bank of the Mississippi. In adopting Sarah Shepard's harsh view of his past life and in fleeing from that past, he flees from himself. Through much of the novel Hugh's actions are an unnatural denial of his own nature. When a farmer on a farm east of Indianapolis mistakes Hugh for a drunkard (35), Hugh recoils at the thought that he has inherited his father's drunken ways. Though not a drunkard, Hugh is very much the son of John McVey. In a town in northern Indiana a railroad man that he meets makes the same mistake. “You've got to get on your feet,” the man tells Hugh; “I was a boozer myself, but I cut it out. A glass of beer now and then, that's my limit” (59). These mistaken assumptions about his character mirror Hugh's own confusion over who he is and what life he should lead. At a time when he searches for a community of hardworking and virtuous people, he is reminded of his own poor white birth and his unworthiness for contact with others. At this point he is as driven by his desire to escape his past as he is drawn forward by Sarah Shepard's dream of a better life.

What Hugh finds, however, is that he is unable either to escape his past or find that life that he has dreamed of. When he arrives to be the new telegraph operator for the Bidwell station, he is cut off from the lives of those around him. The station is located about a mile outside of Bidwell, “out from under the invisible roof of the town” (71). Isolated from his neighbors as he is, Hugh decides “to express himself wholly in work” (71). Initially he turns his attention to solving mathematical problems; he calculates the number of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree and the number of railroad ties needed to support a mile of track. In one sense, however, these exercises are only another form of idleness. While he goes through the motions of work, his calculations are as removed from any application as his sweeping of the already clean station platform had been back in Mudcat Landing. In each case work is an act of self-justification rather than a step towards any external goal.

In his exploration of the motives behind Hugh's work, Anderson first suggests his own uncertainty about Hugh's role. On the one hand, Hugh works (like John Webster in Many Marriages) simply to occupy his mind and “to destroy the tendency to dreams in himself” (68).⁶ But he also works in order to realize a second goal—he works in order to earn the respect of those around him and to be welcomed into their company. In these two distinctly different motives we see Hugh pulled between his poor white past and a new life with the men and women of Bidwell. Though these two motives are not incompatible, they do spring from two very different urges (the urge to reject his past and the urge to affirm a new identity). Soon after his arrival in Bidwell, Hugh turns his mind to more practical problems. He sets out to design a corn harvester and later a plant-setting machine. By the spring of Hugh's second year in Bidwell, however, Anderson has introduced a third motive behind this creative awakening. When planting time arrives, Hugh begins going to the edge of Ezra French's fields and watching the workers setting out the young cabbage plants (work that Anderson had done in his own youth). Anderson writes:

As he saw the stooped misshapen figures crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some god of the night to the performance of a terrible task.

(79)

Standing at the edge of this field at night, Hugh experiences an epiphany; he escapes momentarily from his own troubles, and his heart goes out to the stooped laborers in the fields. Anderson suggests that it is in part this feeling for his fellow man that drives Hugh's creative mind: “For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then another thought came. … The machine-like swing of the bodies of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of building a machine that would do the work they were doing” (80). This third motive behind Hugh's work is not incompatible with his desire to escape his past or to establish a relationship with his neighbors, but as Hugh's machines go to work, Anderson's own ambivalence about his role becomes more pronounced.

Over the course of the novel, Hugh realizes none of his three goals. As his inventions begin to transform the town of Bidwell into a growing industrial center, he feels at times that he has escaped his poor white birth, but such feelings are only momentary.⁷ More often, he remains acutely aware of the former self that still follows him wherever he goes. Though attracted to Rose McCoy, for example, he is unable to act on his feelings for her because of his sense of his own unworthiness:

“She's a good woman. Remember, she's a good woman,” he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. “You tend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more,” he said, as though speaking to another person. “Remember she's a good woman and you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't the right,” he added with a ring of command in his voice.

(243)

In this dialogue Anderson reveals the divided self within Hugh. One self longs to reach out to Rose, while the other restrains that impulse. Hugh is able to escape this repressive second self only momentarily. When the governor of the state comes to Bidwell to campaign for reelection, he praises the townspeople and its leading citizens, mentioning Hugh by name. When Hugh writes Sarah to tell her of his progress, he mentions in his letter the governor's praise. But despite this apparent success, Hugh is still not satisfied with his life, and he remains troubled by feelings of his own inadequacy. His boast to Sarah soon turns to self-deprecation as he tells her, “Anyway they must think I amount to something whether I do or not” (257).

Similarly, Hugh fails at his second goal as well. His hard work does not bring him the friendship he longs for but instead only further separates him from those around him. For example, Steve Hunter is originally afraid of approaching Hugh because he thinks of him as a great man. Rose McCoy too finds Hugh's achievements an obstacle between herself and Hugh. After listening to the governor praise him, Rose thinks to herself, “How could he care for me? How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacher like me?” (238). Both she and Steve Hunter find it difficult to approach Hugh because they imagine him to be someone else; they have elevated him in their minds to the level of greatness. This misperception brings a symmetry to the novel. While earlier Hugh had been mistaken for a drunkard like his father, he has now come to be thought of as the epitome of Sarah Shepard's great man. The irony of the novel is that Hugh is neither. Like earlier misunderstandings, this one too comes about in part because of Hugh's own reticence. The townspeople wonder about this quiet man who lives alone out at the Pickleville station, and Steve Hunter concludes, “His silence might be indicative of anything” (94). This silence is filled by those in the community who imagine a variety of different roles for Hugh. George Pike believes “that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.” Birdie Spinks thinks he is an inventor, while others suspect he has been sent by rich men in Cleveland who want to start a factory (73-74). Even after Hugh's inventions begin to change Bidwell irreversibly, Hugh remains a mystery to his neighbors. His work brings him a distant respect, but it does not bring him the understanding or the companionship that he longs for.

Hugh's marriage to Clara Butterworth does not reverse this pattern of misunderstanding but instead only further dramatizes his essential loneliness.⁸ Clara too misunderstands Hugh and thinks of him as a man who must have thought deeply about the questions raised by the new industrialism. Again, Hugh's silences contribute to this misunderstanding. “Like every one else she wanted heroes,” Anderson tells us, “and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she knew nothing, became a hero” (253). The marriage that follows is hardly one built on mutual understanding. Instead, the wedding party itself resembles a parody of the whole undertaking.

When the farmhand Jim Priest hears of Hugh and Clara's plans to get married, he goes to find Clara's father, Tom, eventually locating him at the house of Fanny Twist, a milliner with a dubious reputation. Returning to the farmhouse with cooks, a band, and guests in tow, Tom indulges in a display of extravagance meant more to boast of a profitable alliance than to celebrate Hugh and Clara's union. As drink takes hold of the guests, and as the party degenerates into a coarse display of excess, Tom begins to speak of his own wedding night, boasting of being “piped as a hatter” (297). The frivolity of the evening, however, only intensifies the sense of isolation that Hugh and Clara endure. All around them the festivities mock the relationship that they both long for. Later that night, when Hugh climbs out of the bedroom window and runs away, his escape is only another sign of the unnaturalness of such a proceeding.

Neither is Hugh any more successful in realizing his third goal—in easing the labor of the workers he has seen in Ezra French's fields. Hugh's inventions do help transform Bidwell from a farming community to a rapidly growing industrial town, but with time Hugh becomes aware of how far removed this change is from the goal he first envisioned standing by the cabbage fields at planting time. It is not that Hugh's inventions do not perform the tasks they were designed to do but instead that they are misused by opportunists of the new age. For example, when Hugh's plant-setting machine fails (one of his early inventions), Steve Hunter has already positioned himself to profit from the failure. While the small investors lose their money, Steve Hunter buys up the now devalued equipment at low prices. What Anderson dramatizes here is a shift in value from the work that the machine performs to a profit unrelated to any work. The small investors naively watch the test field and pray for the success of the machine, while Steve Hunter begins making plans to gain control of the company. In these two different ways of looking at the machine, Anderson captures a basic shift in values. In Steve Hunter the ends of work become disassociated from the plant-setting machine itself and instead attach to the money to be made from the enterprise. As a result he can in good conscience send Ed Hall into the test field at night to replace the dying cabbages and to keep the deception alive (128). If for no other reason, Poor White remains a significant novel for its depiction of this new business morality.

With time Hugh becomes aware of the failure of his machines to improve the workers' lives. Passing the corn-cutter factory one evening, Hugh overhears the grumbling of the men just leaving their shift. “I thought it was mighty funny, all this talk about the factory work being so easy,” one of the men complains; “I wish the old days were back. I don't see how that inventor or his inventions ever helped us workers. Dad was right about him. He said an inventor wouldn't do nothing for workers. He said it would be better to tar and feather that telegraph operator” (263). Ironically, this voice that Hugh overhears in the dark is the same voice that he had heard coming from Ezra French's field. That dream that Hugh once had of joining the workers and sharing in their labor has now come to something far different, something he had not anticipated and that he now only half understands. Later, when one of the town's craftsmen, Joe Wainsworth, physically attacks Hugh, this discontent takes a more tangible form. In the end, Hugh is as unable to enjoy the success of his machines as he is to escape his poor white past or to find understanding among his neighbors. Each of his early goals remains unrealized.

Towards the end of the novel, Hugh's failure to realize any of his original goals leads him to question Sarah Shepard's early lessons and the life he has been pursuing. In a number of passages in the novel, however, Anderson suggests a far different direction for Hugh. At one point in the conception of the novel, Anderson appears to have conceived of Hugh as a kind of hero of the new age. At times Anderson describes the machine not as a destructive thing but as a thing of beauty. He speaks of it as having created “a new kind of poetry” in the land (231). The McVey Corn-Cutter, for example, has proved a success; it has eased man's labor and made for him a time of idleness and thoughtfulness.

Hugh's machine took all of the heavier part of the work away. It cut the corn near the ground and bound it into bundles that fell upon a platform. Two men followed the machine, one to drive the horses and the other to place the bundles of stalks against the shocks and to bind the completed shocks. The men went along smoking their pipes and talking. The horses stopped and the driver stared out over the prairies. His arms did not ache with weariness and he had time to think. The wonder and mystery of the wide open places got into his blood. At night when the work was done and the cattle fed and made comfortable in the barns, he did not go at once to bed but sometimes went out of his house and stood for a moment under the stars.

(230)

What is remarkable about such a description is the way in which Anderson has incorporated the machine into the natural order. This scene stands in sharp contrast to that archetypal moment that Leo Marx describes when the machine suddenly bursts on the landscape destroying the natural repose (Marx 15-16). Here the presence of the machine makes possible man's contemplation of nature. Despite the indictment of industrialism that Poor White makes, a side of Anderson continued to believe in the machine as a potential source of good (David Anderson 59-60). Hugh thinks of it as such, and it is only with time that he finally recognizes the destructive side of his machines.

The movement of the novel, however, is not from this early idealized faith in the machine to a maturer recognition of its true nature. Instead, Anderson himself remained torn between these two conceptions of the machine and the two conflicting roles that such views suggest for Hugh. On the one hand, Hugh is the typical Anderson hero who turns his back on the world of business and money-making in order to discover a new freedom within himself. On the other hand, he is a hero of the new age, a man who tames the machine and saves a generation from dehumanizing work. Clara views her husband as such a hero; in her mind the factory is “a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh has tamed” (253). But more importantly, Anderson himself at times viewed Hugh in this way. In one passage Anderson brings the novel down to the present moment. In the early pages of book 4 he writes of Hugh as having helped to free the giant of industry (231). Anderson continues, “He is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at it, making new inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant” (231). These two conceptions of Hugh's role reveal Anderson's own ambivalence towards the new age. On the one hand, Anderson wants to be a poet of the machine, while on the other hand, he has Hugh come face to face with the destructiveness of the new industrialism.

The closing scenes of the novel point unmistakably towards Hugh's rejection of the machine age and his turning toward the human problems of his own life with Clara.⁹ Ever since Joe Wainsworth's violent attack, Hugh has been infected with the virus of thinking, Anderson tells us. He now questions any simple view of progress, and he finds it difficult to apply himself to the mechanical problems before him. Tom, who has now become Steve Hunter's partner and who has risen to a position of power in the town, instructs Hugh to try to get around the patents of an Iowa inventor's hay-loading machine, and in this new work, Anderson dramatizes a further corruption of creative labor. No longer does the machine that Hugh labors over have a unique purpose (the Iowa inventor's machine already does the job), and no longer can Hugh believe in the value of his work. Instead, the altered design that Tom wants Hugh to develop is simply a means of gaining a share of the profits from the Iowa inventor. In the end it is this corruption of work that Hugh rejects, but his rejection is nevertheless a rejection of the mechanical age itself.

In the final scene of the novel when Hugh and Clara stand together by an open field, it becomes clear that Hugh's life of work with the new machines is at an end.¹⁰ Clara no longer thinks of her husband as one who will help solve the mechanical problems of the age (370), and Tom too, realizing this, has already spoken to Steve Hunter about getting a new man to do Hugh's work (363). This change in Hugh becomes even clearer when Anderson writes that the disease of thinking “was making Hugh useless for the work of his age” (371). Clearly Anderson leaves us with no heroic figure taming the giant of industry.

In his review of Poor White H. L. Mencken recognized this conflict within the novel, though he put it in different terms. Writing in the Smart Set, Mencken observed a tension in the novel between Anderson's role as an artist and his role as a reformer:

What ails him primarily is the fact that there are two Andersons, sharply differentiated and tending to fall into implacable antagonisms. One is the artist who sees the America of his day as the most cruel and sordid, and yet at the same time as the most melodramatic and engrossing of spectacles … the artist standing, as it were, above the turmoil, and intent only upon observing it accurately and presenting it honestly, feelingly and unhindered. The other is a sort of uncertain social reformer—one appalled by the muddle of ideas and aspirations in the Republic, and impelled to do something or say something, however fantastic, however obvious, to help along the slow and agonizing process of reorganization.

(273-74)

Viewed in these terms, the artist in Anderson seems content with describing Hugh's withdrawal from the world, while the reformer in Anderson would have Hugh bring to fruition the full potential of the new machines. It is a mistake, however, to view only reform as a positive action. (Mencken himself values the artist above the reformer.) Even as Hugh turns his back on the work of the new age, he is affirming a belief in what his life can be. As he and Clara return to their farmhouse to sleep, Anderson suggests that for the first time they will find rest and comfort in each other.

Writing over forty years ago in his classic study of American literature, Alfred Kazin attempted to capture the spirit of modern American writing when he wrote:

Who is there to deny that for fifty years the ethos of American literature at its best has been resignation, attack, escape, but so rarely acceptance? Who is there to deny that the very fame of American writing in the modern era, the very effort to create a responsible literature in America appropriate to a new age, rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it?

(31)¹¹

Kazin singles out no particular individuals, but instead speaks of a common sentiment in the literature of the period. Certainly Sherwood Anderson was a writer squarely rooted in this tradition of alienation, as were so many others of his generation. But while we should not deny that orientation, neither should we let our preoccupation with the idea of alienation hide that spirit of affirmation in Anderson's stories and novels. Critical discussion of Anderson too often focuses on Winesburg, Ohio, as a place of suppressed desires and severed connections between lovers and neighbors. Rarely are Anderson's small towns seen as places of virtue, though clearly his cities offer no better. What is lost in such a view is Anderson's struggle for order, stability, and security. Throughout his writing there is a lingering sense of what could be. The misfit Elmer Cowley has it, as do John Webster, Bruce Dudley, and Hugh McVey. It is this faith in the possibility of a better life that motivates the actions of Anderson's characters and that defies that pervasive sense of alienation.

While Anderson's men and women often look back to a pre-industrial good life for their sense of what has been lost, their longing is not simply for what can never be. Instead, their actions are a clear indication of their faith in what can be regained and reaffirmed in the present. Anderson does not call for a return to the brutish innocence of Mudcat Landing or for the reversal of Bidwell's industrial development. Instead his stories and novels express the very real need to hold to what is permanent and unchanging in our nature. As Clara discovers, a new machine that goes along a road at a very fast speed may indeed change the face of the earth, but it does not change certain facts of her life. In his writing, Anderson repeatedly reminds us of these unchanging facts. He reminds us of those basic human needs that have been all but drowned out by the roar of the machine. He reminds us, finally, of who we are and what we can still be to one another.

Such a message is hardly cause for despair. Hugh and Clara's search for a good life in accord with their nature may be hesitant and faltering, but it is nevertheless purposeful. In the words of David Anderson, they struggle “to find and retain human values in the face of a whistling, screeching, triumphant industrialism” (59). Kazin charges that modern American writers have steeped themselves in the experience of their country but, in a real sense, “never learned to live in it” (31). A rereading of Anderson, however, suggests otherwise. By the end of Poor White, Hugh and Clara stand together and face a life far different from the life that their neighbors still pursue. With their new knowledge of themselves and with their new relationship with each other, they seem ready to leave behind them that past of confusion, misunderstanding, and loneliness. This new-found health promises a different life for Hugh and Clara, and for their children. Anderson believed in that promise, and we might understand him and his times better by recognizing its positive influence in all of his writing.

Notes

1. Anderson is reported to have suddenly gotten up from his desk and walked away from his Elyria business. Several days later he was found in Cleveland suffering from amnesia. For Anderson's own account of this event in his life, see Story Teller's Story 96-99, 215-36. For other accounts, see Sutton, Exit to Elsinore; Townsend 76-82.

2. Though Poor White is a neglected work, it is generally spoken well of when it does attract critical commentary. When it was published in the fall of 1920, H. L. Mencken, writing in the Smart Set, called it Anderson's best novel and proclaimed, “The Anderson promise begins to be fulfilled” (275). More recent critics, including Walter Rideout and Kim Townsend, have echoed Mencken's judgment (Rideout ix; Townsend 150).

3. James Schevill is one critic who repeats Sarah Shepard's judgment, describing Hugh's father as “good-for-nothing” (127). Much of Hugh's struggle over the course of the novel, however, is a struggle to escape such labels and to acknowledge his own self-worth. To dismiss the value of Hugh's life with his father is to misread Hugh's character as he works towards a reconciliation with his own poor white birth. It is this same misreading that has led Daniel Hoeber to describe Hugh's dreams as a regression (51). Nancy Bunge is virtually alone in her opposition to this view, insisting on the healthy influence of Hugh's youth (253).

4. In her recent study of Anderson, Kenny Williams understates the drawbacks of Sarah Shepard's way of life when she suggests that Hugh “is saved” by Sarah (201). In order to appreciate Hugh's dilemma, it is necessary to recognize the positives and negatives of Hugh's two choices.

5. In his discussion of Poor White, Rex Burbank makes the mistake of compressing events in the early part of the novel. He writes of Hugh's early dissatisfaction with “the squalid, torpid life of his ‘poor white’ background” (81). While there is of course a growing dissatisfaction within Hugh, it is important to recognize that this dissatisfaction does not begin until Hugh is first exposed to Henry and Sarah Shepard.

6. Hugh bears a close resemblance to John Webster. In Many Marriages Anderson describes Webster as “a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer” (3). Later Anderson adds that “he kept his mind on affairs and did not give way to dreams and vague thoughts” (29).

7. Even Steve Hunter's insistence that Hugh's parents “were of the best English stock” (228) fails to comfort Hugh. In the end, this momentary escape is as superficial as the lie itself. Hugh continues to be haunted by his own feelings of inadequacy.

8. Like Hugh, Clara too is misunderstood by those around her. Her father does not trust her, nor do the relatives she lives with while attending the state university. Ironically, Clara's marriage to Hugh is the direct result of these misunderstandings. When the marriage that her father had arranged falls through, Clara's reputation suffers. It is at this point, when her reputation is at its lowest, that Hugh is able to overcome his own feelings of inadequacy and propose.

9. Blanche Gelfant suggests that the novel ends with Hugh's internal conflict still unresolved, but in her discussion of the novel she implies a clear direction for Hugh. She argues, appropriately I believe, that there is a direct corollary in the novel between the rise of industrialism and the failure of love (63). Such a corollary suggests that Hugh's movement towards Clara at the end of the novel is a movement away from Hugh's own participation in the machine age.

10. Those critics who have discussed the ambiguous ending of the novel have often focused on the unresolved tensions between Hugh and Clara. Hugh's relationship to his work is far less ambiguous.

11. More recent literary histories have also characterized Anderson's writing by this quality of alienation. Wendy Steiner describes Poor White as a novel focusing on the theme of alienation (Elliott 860). While certainly this theme is present in the novel, my point here is that there is another current present as well, one equally important which is often overlooked.

Works Cited

Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation. American Authors and Critics Series. New York: Holt, 1967.

Anderson, Sherwood. Many Marriages. New York: Huebsch, 1923.

———. Poor White. New York: Huebsch, 1920.

———. A Story Teller's Story: A Critical Text. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Cleveland: P of Case Western U, 1968.

Bunge, Nancy L. “The Ambiguous Endings of Sherwood Anderson's Novels.” Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies. Ed. Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1976. 249-63.

Burbank, Rex. Sherwood Anderson. New York: Grosset, 1964.

Elliott, Emory, et al., eds. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Gelfant, Blanche H. “A Novel of Becoming.” Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Walter Rideout. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1974. 59-64.

Hoeber, Daniel R. “The ‘Unkinging’ of Man: Intellectual Background as Structural Device in Sherwood Anderson's Poor White.” South Dakota Review 15.1 (1977): 45-60.

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