Main currents in American thought

Unlike our earlier naturalists in handling of material and dramatic interests. Concerned with inner life rather than outer, with hidden drives rather than environment. Accepts the main criteria of naturalism: determinism, distortion, pessimism. A lean and sparing writer whose symbolisms are obscure and puzzling. A single theme: the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create grotesques. Due to (1) Crude, narrow environment that drives to strange aberrations; (2) Repressed instincts that break forth in abnormal action. The consequence a black loneliness—the hunger of fellowship and its denial. Limited in scope to episodic crises—hence his better stories short. Many failures: Marching Men; Windy McPherson’s Son; Poor White (1920); Many Marriages (1923)—a clumsy account of a Babbitt gone on a psychological spree; Horses and Men (1923)—some more Grotesques; see in particular “A Chicago Hamlet.”

Winesburg, Ohio (1918). A prose Spoon River Anthology, with an excellent collection of grotesques. Sharp vignettes; lonely, thwarted lives, “confused and disconcerted by the facts of life.” A background of earlier America, crude and ugly, that drives to religious fanaticism in Steve Bentley; to passionate rebellion in Kate Swift; to bitter irony in Ray Pearson. Note the deterministic conclusion of “The Untold Lie”—“Tricked, by Gad, that’s what I was; tricked by life and made a fool of”; and the pessimism: ... “he shouted a protest against his life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.”

The Triumph of the Egg (1921). A strange and difficult book with its subtle symbolisms. The theme is the common hunger for romance and fellowship that confuses itself with sex and is unsatisfied. Suggested in prefatory poem: “I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to tell it.”

2. Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. Theme is the “white wonder of life”—what it is and the part it plays in shaping life; a sex illusion that in its mystic appeal to youth guarantees the perpetuation of the race. To age there is no “white wonder,” but the life processes are dirty, and lead to final imprisonment in a common trap. Hence the “white wonder” is the supreme jest of nature, sardonic, beguiling, gathering its victims who eagerly run their predetermined course.

3. Brothers. A suggestion of the true “white wonder of life”—the brotherhood of man in a lonely world—“beyond words, beyond passion—the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life.” But men cannot break through the walls of themselves to grasp it, and the dirt of the world destroys its beauty. “The whole story of mankind’s loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty, tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness.” “We have different names but we are brothers.” “Already I have written three hundred, four hundred thousand words. Are there no words that lead into life?” See conclusion of “The Man in the Brown Coat.”

A Story Teller’s Story (1924). An attempt to lay bare the emotional life of one seeking to be an artist in America; to plumb his own consciousness, to escape from a world he hates. Such escape comes from reaching down “through all the broken surface distractions of modern life to that old craft out of which culture springs.” He must pull himself free from a deadening and devastating routine of an industrial society with its empty ambitions. And having found his craft he finds a recompense in life. “I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in factories. And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by men and women who had never known me, could have no personal reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean at such moments of service?” A stimulating and suggestive document of modern life.

The note of determinism in Anderson expressed in two images, the wall and escape—running to get away from what holds us fast. But in running away from the old self to find a new, we carry the old self with us. Anderson one of the three or four most important men now writing fiction in America. Compare with D. H. Lawrence.