Call If You Need Me (34 page)

Anderson hadn’t read
The Grapes of Wrath
when he met the young John Steinbeck in November 1939, but he wrote from Fresno to Lewis Galantière that he thought Steinbeck looked like “a truck driver on his day off.” He went on to remark that the situation in the labor camps “is in no way different from what is going on all over the country,” and attributed the great popularity of the book to the fact that it “localizes a situation that is universal.” It’s clear that he didn’t like the star-bright attention that was being paid to Steinbeck at the time.

Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, in 1876, but grew up mostly in Clyde, a little town near Cleveland. His father was a drifter who moved the family “whenever the rent came due.” For years Anderson took whatever manual labor jobs he could find until he put on a different sort of collar and went into advertising. He had, he said, “cunning.” He could “handle people, make them do as I please, be what I wanted them to be.… the truth is I was a smooth son of a bitch.” But he knew firsthand the underbelly of small town life in mid-America; and he wrote about it better, and with more fidelity and sympathy, than any American writer before him—and most of
them since his time. Small towns and small lives were his subject matter. He loved America, and things American, with a devotion that, even at this remove, I find touching. “I love this country,” he will say in his letters. And, “God, how I love this country.” His heart, and his abiding interests—and his true genius—were rooted in rural areas and with country people and their ways. This from a letter to Waldo Frank in 1919: “It was delightful to sit in the grandstand among the farmers, off for a day’s vacation, and see the trotting and pacing races. The horses were beautiful as were also the fine steers, bulls, pigs and sheep on show in the exhibition sheds.” In a letter to George Church, written in 1927, he said, “What I really want to do—my purpose in writing—is to grow eloquent again about this country—I want to tell you how the streams sound at night—how quiet it is—the sound the wind makes in the pines.”

He thought the best thing he’d ever written was his short story “The Egg.” In addition to this, his favorite stories were “The Untold Lie,” “Hands,” “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “I’m a Fool.” At the very least I would add to this list “Death in the Woods” and “The Man Who Became a Woman.”

With the one novel that made him some money,
Dark Laughter
, he bought himself a farm in Troutdale, Virginia. But he was a restless man, a true American wanderer, who couldn’t stay in one place. From 1919 until his death in February 1941 from peritonitis, on board a ship bound for South America (where he hoped to “get out of one of the bigger cities and into a town of five or ten thousand and perhaps stay in such a town for some months”), he was all over this country. He lived and worked in New York, California, Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado, Florida—forty or fifty different residences in all—with time out for trips to Europe and Mexico. It helped that he “adored” hotels. “Even the worst of hotel life is so good compared with family life.” He found a particular hotel in Kansas City very much to his liking: “full of
little ham actors, prize fighters, ballplayers, whores and auto salesmen on their uppers. Lord God what gaudy people. I love them.”

He was a prolific letter writer. Most of the 201 letters that make up this collection are being published for the first time. An earlier book,
Letters of Sherwood Anderson
, edited by Howard Mumford Jones and including 401 letters, was published in 1953. And there is the easily accessible group of letters in
The Portable Sherwood Anderson
that Horace Gregory edited in 1949.

The Newberry Library in Chicago holds over five thousand Anderson letters, and this collection has provided the nucleus for the present selection. But the editor, Charles E. Modlin, has also chosen letters from twenty-three other institutions, as well as from private individuals, “reserved” letters that have only recently been made available. He has chosen well, the letters dealing about equally with personal and professional concerns. And there was plenty going on in Anderson’s life on both counts. This volume alone maps the life of a unique American writer, one whose presence is still felt in the plain-talk, straightforward fiction of many of today’s writers.

These letters go a long way toward bringing Sherwood Anderson into the full light, where he belongs. To be sure, they are not letters written in the grand tradition of Letters, with one eye aimed at the recipient and the other on posterity. Nor are they “tailored” to match the personality of the recipient. Some of them were written in longhand, and Anderson apologized for this. If I have any reservation, it is that there tends to be a sameness of tone that hangs over them. And I think the fact that he didn’t use contractions in his writing helps contribute to their seemingly subdued, formal, even elegiac manner. Reading these letters, we learn some things about Anderson and his work. But, finally, one comes away with the feeling that this man who didn’t often show his emotions is very much like one of his stoic characters—holding back, unable to speak his mind or bare his heart.

In 1939, a year and a half before his death, he wrote to Roger
Sergel about a new book he was starting: “I’m trying again. A man has to begin over and over … to try to think and feel only in the very limited field, the house on the street, the man at the corner drugstore.”

He was a brave man and a good writer—estimable qualities in these days or any other.

Gaston Gallimard, the French publisher, had acquired the rights to
Winesburg
but didn’t publish the book immediately. Finally, after several years, Anderson was in Paris and went to see the distinguished president of the firm.

“Is it a good book?” Gallimard asked Anderson.

“You’re damn right it is,” Anderson answered.

“Well, then, if it’s good, it will still be good when we do publish it.”

Anderson’s best work is still good. He might have penned his own epitaph when he wrote, “I have written a few stories that are like stones laid along the highway. They have solidity and will stay there.”

In 1954, after surviving two plane crashes in Africa and being reported dead, Ernest Hemingway had the unique experience of being able to read his own obituaries. I was in my teens, barely old enough to have a driver’s license, but I can remember seeing his picture on the front page of our evening newspaper, grinning as he held a copy of a paper with his picture and a banner headline announcing his death. I’d heard his name in my high school English class, and I had a friend who, like me, wanted to write and who managed to work Hemingway’s name into just about every conversation we had. But at the time I’d never read anything the man had written. (I was busy reading Thomas B. Costain, among others.) Seeing Hemingway on the front page, reading about his exploits and accomplishments, and his recent brush with death, was heady and glamorous stuff. But there were no wars I could get to even if I’d wanted to, and Africa, not to mention Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Cuba, even New York City, seemed as far away as the moon to me. Still, I think my resolve to be a writer was strengthened by seeing Hemingway’s picture on the front page. So I was indebted to him even then, if for the wrong reasons.

Soon after the accidents in Africa, Hemingway, musing on his life, wrote, “The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man’s life.” The search for Ernest Hemingway goes on. It’s almost twenty-five years since the writer, seriously ill, paranoid and despondent, suffering from loss of memory brought about by electroshock treatments during two successive confinements at the Mayo Clinic, blew his head away with a shotgun. Mary Welsh Hemingway, his fourth wife, asleep in the upstairs master bedroom of the Hemingway residence in Ketchum, Idaho, was awakened on the morning of July 2, 1961, by what she thought were the sounds of “a couple of drawers banging shut.” Edmund Wilson best expressed the general sense of shock and diminishment after his death: “It is as if a whole corner of my generation had suddenly and horribly collapsed.”

In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” (John O’Hara’s wildly extravagant assessment in praise of
Across the River and into the Trees
) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought. They agree that at least one, maybe two, of the novels (
The Sun Also Rises
and, possibly,
A Farewell to Arms
) might make it into the twenty-first century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center stage and deadly “reappraisals” began taking place.

It is not entirely coincidental, either, that soon after his death a particular kind of writing began to appear in this country, writing that stressed the irrational and fabulous, the antirealist against the realist tradition. In this context, it might be worthwhile to remind ourselves what Hemingway believed good writing should do. He felt fiction must be based on actual experience. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” he wrote in his introduction to
Men at War
. “His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.” And he also wrote: “find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it so clear that … it
can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”

Given his stature and influence, maybe the sharp reaction after his death was inevitable. But gradually, especially within the last decade, critics have been better able to separate the celebrity big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman, the heavy-drinking bully and brawler from the disciplined craftsman and artist whose work seems to me, with each passing year, to become more durable.

“The great thing is to last and get your work done,” Hemingway said in
Death in the Afternoon
. And that, essentially, is what he did. Who was this man—by his own admission, “a son of a bitch”—whose novels and books of short stories changed forever the way fiction was written and, for a time, even the way people thought about themselves?

Peter Griffin’s wonderful and intimate book,
Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years
(the title is from one of Hemingway’s early poems), supplies some of the answers. Mr. Griffin was a young Ph.D. student at Brown University when he wrote a short letter to Mary Hemingway telling her how important Hemingway’s work had been to him at a difficult time in his life. She invited him to visit and promised full cooperation in writing this book, the first of three biographical volumes. Working a territory where a regiment of literary scholars and specialists have gone before, Mr. Griffin has uncovered a significant amount of new and revealing information. (Five previously uncollected short stories are also included.) Several chapters deal with Hemingway’s early family life and relationships. His mother was an overbearing woman with pretensions to being a singer; his father was a prominent doctor who taught Hemingway to hunt and fish and gave him his first pair of boxing gloves.

But by far the larger and more important part of the book is devoted to Hemingway’s coming of age as a reporter for the
Kansas City Star
, then as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was seriously injured by an Austrian mortar shell and machine-gun bullets. There is a long section devoted to his
convalescence in a military hospital in Milan. While there he fell in love with a nurse from Pennsylvania named Agnes Kurowsky, who became the model for Catherine Barkley in
A Farewell to Arms
. (She jilted him for an Italian count.)

In 1919 he returned home to Oak Park, Illinois, wearing “a cock-feathered Bersaglieri hat, a knee-length officer’s cape lined with red satin, and a British tunic decorated with ribbons of the Valor Medal and the War Cross.” He had to use a cane to walk. He was a hero, and he signed up with a lecture agency to talk to civic groups about his experience in the war. When he was finally asked to leave home by his angry and bewildered parents (Hemingway didn’t want to work at a job, liked to sleep in late and spend his afternoons shooting pool), he went to the peninsula country in Upper Michigan and then to Toronto, where he accepted room and board and eighty dollars a month from a wealthy family to tutor and “make a man out of’ the family’s retarded son.

From Toronto he moved to Chicago, where he shared rooms and a bohemian life with a friend named Bill Horne. He worked at a magazine called
Commonwealth Cooperative
, for which he wrote, in his words, “Boys’ Personals, The Country Division, Miss Congress’s fiction, bank editorials, children’s stories, etc.” At this time, Hemingway began meeting literary people like Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg. He liked to read aloud and explain the poems of Keats and Shelley and once, in the company of Sandburg, who praised his “sensitive interpretation,” he read from
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
. He was crazy about dancing and won a dance contest with a woman friend named Kate Smith. (She later married John Dos Passos.) In October 1920, he met another woman, eight years older than he, who would become his first wife—the remarkable Elizabeth Hadley Richardson.

In the nine months of their courtship—she was living in St. Louis while Hemingway was living and working in Chicago—
they each wrote over one thousand pages of letters. (Hadley’s correspondence was made available to Mr. Griffin by Jack Hemingway, the son of Ernest and Hadley, who has also provided a foreword to this volume.) The passages Mr. Griffin quotes are intelligent, witty, often moving, and show her offering a shrewd and perceptive response to the stories, sketches and poems that the twenty-one-year-old Hemingway was sending her every week.