My reading life began at 41 Furman
Lane, Patchogue, NY with three authors, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Wolfe and
Sherwood Anderson. This was before high
school ended in 1962. I did not read or
I choose to think I did not read in high school. Fortunately I was not required to write
essays or even do what is now called research papers. We were prepared for the Regents Exams, a
form of state exams and I did rather well on them but even there we were not
required, at least back then to write extended essays. I did well enough to be offered a Regent’s
scholarship which I did not use as I went away to Beloit College because that
college was a thousand miles from Patchogue.
No books were required to be read at
Patchogue High School or I have put them firmly out of mind. There were text books and I remember only two
authors from that time T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy, though I could not be said
to have read them. Shakespeare was
certainly presented but it seemed that we watched film strips about the
plays. In no way am I complaining about
any of this as my “education” at Patchogue High School did not interfere with
my reading life.
My reason for writing these sentences
is the Library of America finally publishing a volume devoted to Sherwood
Anderson and it is focused on his short stories. It is edited by a tenured professor of
creative writing, but that need not concern us.
Winesburg Ohio is contained in this
volume and that is the book of Sherwood Anderson’s that I read. I imagine like many readers back then and
sadly that is the reality when it comes to Anderson, back then, as the experiences
he writes about have been shoved to the side in the multi-ethnicization of
American writing, which has led to an incredible provincializing of the United
States, a turning inward to the warring kingdoms of double-barreled ethnic
writings so that every anthology that might have some use in the schools of the
United States must be balanced out along
the ethnic and racial preoccupations of the educational elite so that we have
Dominican-American, Mexican-America, Puerto Rican-American, Cuban-American,
Chinese-American, Korean-American, Native American, Afro -American, not to
leave out Vietnamese-American and and on and and (probably leaving out--- ah, I
did the sexual and gender categories that are now also required while I well know that much of this began with
the rise of Jewish American and then Irish American and then Italian American…
the result has been a closing off of our world from books from other countries
and one of those countries might be the world represented by Sherwood Anderson.
We have forgotten that there
are only writers: good writers and bad writers, great books and lousy books.
Sherwood Anderson’s whole life was
dedicated to the word and the word made flesh in what used to be called small
town America… it was before Faulkner… the first real step away from New England…
Readers should find SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAKE AND OTHER UNCOLLECTED
PROSE by Edward Dalhberg (Dalkey Archive Press,1989) and there find his essay “Old Masters”, originally published
in the New York Times of all places when one thinks of what has happened to the
NYTimes! One of those old masters was Sherwood
Anderson and; “the most prodigious mishap of the young American writer is that
he has no Master, or an elder of letters to guide him; and so be relies wholly upon
himself, a very unrealistic teacher. I
was lucky; I knew Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson” (for comparison think of the poor saps today
who look to Paul Auster or Jonathan Franzen)
FROM THE ESSAY: If a book is not
physical, the words are as empty as gourds and dry as the shards in the Mount Sinai
Desert we hear of in the Book of Job.
OR:
I cannot repeat too often, choose
a seer! Never mind being the great
original. If you’ve got a dram of talent
and are influenced by Erasmus, Gustave Flaubert or Charles Baudelaire you’ll
still be yourself, without them you are likely to amount to nothing as an
author.”
OR: Every book is a mistake, just as life is or
mine is”
OR: I remember any number of scullion reviewers who denounced Sherwood Anderson for being confused. Anybody who supposes he has a clear brain has
a vacant one. If the author was not
obscure to himself, a glut and flux of nebulous sensations, what urgent
necessity would he have to make a clear lucid book?”
OR: A vile book that exacts some sort of feeling
from us is a cony-catcher, and no one cares to be fooled by a friend, a drama
or a woman… Let me say once more everybody is a mistake and I am an imperial
one.
OR:
Who goes to a book to discover what
he already knows?
AND THEN THE SHIFT from another essay: How Greek or Roman is the American? We are nobody until we recognize Odysseus,
Protesilaus or Aeneas in our selves.
America is Trojan, Greek, Aztec, Mayan, and Indian. The ghosts in our civilization are being
resurrected so that we can see that the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians and
our savannahs are corporeal gods.
The books of
stories included in the Library of America ANDERSON : Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
and Men, Death in the Woods
THE POST
SCIPTUM: in a recent note to Denis
Donoghue “I was never smart
enough to read E.M. Forster or for that matter Thomas Hardy and John Hawkes...
my reading began on the ferry going from Glasgow to Dublin September
1964 trying to read FROM AN ABANDONED WORK by Samuel Beckett...
before that I had only read books by Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Wolfe and
Sherwood Anderson and James Thomson BV... this is... outside of
what was required... so very unlike yourself.
THE
POST POST SCRIPTUM: Anderson invents
reality it might be said or… I was told Anderson was the single most requested
author for inclusion in the Library of America…
so that is the good news, the sad news, it has taken so long…
